Oral history interview with Steve Haas
Transcript
- I want to thank you for coming here tonight
- to listen to my story.
- I am not an expert speaker.
- And you have to forgive me for my poor delivery.
- I agreed to talk to you because the survivors of the Holocaust
- slowly are dying out one by one.
- And a few of us who are still around
- have the obligation to see that the generation following us
- do not forget what happened to the Jews
- during the Second World War.
- --and see that it never happens again.
- I start by telling you that I was
- born in Hungary, in Budapest.
- And we lived near Budapest.
- Budapest is the principal city of Hungary.
- And my father had a lumber yard in Arpadfold,
- in this little village.
- I finished the previous year, my studies, an artist,
- three years school.
- And I was helping my father in his lumber yard.
- Only already at this time, the Jews in Hungary
- had a very hard time.
- They started to employ the Jewish laws,
- the antisemitic laws.
- They fired all the employees who worked for the government,
- in the newspapers and the radio.
- They warned people not to patronize or go
- to the Jewish intellectuals, doctors, engineers, lawyers,
- and if they can avoid it, not to buy from Jews,
- not to support Jewish businesses.
- As I said there was a hot August day in 1940.
- And I was walking toward our business,
- toward our lumber yard.
- And I saw my father at the gate standing.
- And as I approached him, I noticed on his face
- he was very sad and frightened.
- And as I came, he handed me an order from the government.
- And the order said that I should report next day in a schoolyard
- a couple miles from our place where I lived.
- There was no instruction whatsoever
- to bring anything with us, clothing or food,
- just appear in person.
- I did that.
- I went there next morning.
- And I saw in the schoolyard hundreds
- of other Jews already surrendered by Hungarian police
- and soldiers with weapons.
- And that day started an incredible five years
- of suffering because that was the first day I
- had to stay there the whole day long
- in the beating sun, hot sun, without food, without water.
- We were forbidden to communicate with our parents, our families,
- are not able to phone or send out messages.
- And that was the first day in my life
- where I slept on the bare ground.
- Next day, it was the same.
- We were beaten and abused by the soldiers.
- We got some food, some liquid food.
- But we didn't have any utensils to eat from.
- So we found some scrap, rusted scrap
- and shared the food between us.
- And the Hungarian soldiers amused themselves
- by kicking the food out from our hands.
- A sergeant, Hungarian sergeant, asked for volunteers
- to go to Budapest to the city for some requisition.
- I volunteered to go with him because I
- figured I will have a chance to get in contact with my aunt.
- She lived in Budapest.
- And so I was able to send a message to my family.
- I was sure that they are scared to death not knowing
- what happened with me.
- Well, they took us, but not for a requisition.
- They dumped us in a Hungarian soldiers camp,
- where we were forced right away to carry heavy straw
- bales from second story warehouse
- down on ramp to the waiting trucks on our bare shoulder,
- the whole day long, from morning to evening.
- And you can imagine how we felt. We are not
- used to that kind of work.
- It was very heavy.
- A bale weighed about 100 pounds.
- And the task was, I guess, even trying for a farm worker who
- was used to that kind of labor.
- We are, of course, dirty and bloody at the end of the day.
- But I managed to get a note to my aunt.
- And I received from her--
- she was able to, I think, bribe a Hungarian soldier.
- And I got some soap and a shirt and some food.
- Well, I worked about two days here.
- And then they brought us back to the schoolyard.
- And with the other Jewish men in the schoolyard,
- we were embarked in boxcars and sent
- to the Hungarian-Romanian border.
- At this time, Hungary had a prime minister called Teleki.
- He was sympathetic to the Allies, to the West,
- and tried to compromise somehow.
- But the German pressure was too heavy, too much.
- And he committed suicide.
- You have to understand that Hungary was never
- invaded by the Germans.
- They fought with the Germans voluntarily and willingly.
- Only in 1944, end of the war, in May 1944,
- did the Germans send in 800 German troops and 20
- Sonderkommandos--
- they call them Sonderkommandos--
- leaded by Eichmann, the famous Eichmann.
- And the purpose was, of course to liquidate
- the Hungarian Jews.
- As I said before, Teleki, Prime Minister Teleki
- committed suicide.
- And we had a regent called Miklos Horthy.
- He was antisemite too.
- But before the German came to power,
- he let them live, let the Jews lived.
- I mean they lived their own life.
- He didn't interfere too much with their business
- and so forth and so on.
- He personally didn't like the Jews.
- But they made a living.
- They lived peacefully.
- After Teleki's suicide, Horthy appointed a prime minister
- named Ladislaus Bárdossy.
- He was a rabid antisemite and willingly joined and cooperated
- with the Germans.
- In fact, he declared war against England
- and disposed the Hungarian soldiers
- to the German high command.
- Well, as I said, they sent me from the schoolyard
- to the Romanian border.
- Well, Hitler, for the Hungarian cooperation,
- gave Hungary Transylvania, part of Transylvania.
- Now, Transylvania belonged to Hungary
- before the First World War and after the First World War
- became Romania.
- Of course, the Hungarians always disputed Transylvania.
- And they fought, they had animosity between the Romanians
- and Hungarians.
- What the Romanians did, they build a small Maginot Line,
- they called the Carol Line, because their king's name
- was Carol, Carol Line.
- They were fortifications small, concrete pillboxes
- about 500 feet from each other on the Hungarian border.
- And our job was to dig out the boulders
- around the fortifications, filled
- the fortifications with explosives,
- and then blow them up.
- We did this job.
- It was a terribly hard job.
- You can imagine especially for Jewish boys
- who never used to that work.
- But frankly, it made me strong, stronger.
- Every day labor out, instead of weaker, made me stronger,
- and so did the other boys.
- The only trouble was this time that they
- appointed a former officer, a Jewish officer,
- as a supervisor.
- And this Jewish officer was so afraid
- that he will be reduced to our status
- that he will be forced to work like we did,
- that he drove us worse than a Gentile soldier would do.
- That was the bad part of it.
- A pleasant memory that I have from that time
- is that, as I told you, Transylvania
- was just attached to Hungary.
- And the Romanians in general were
- more sympathetic to the Jews than the Hungarians.
- They were more liberal.
- And in Cluj, in they call it Nagyvárad, where we worked,
- there was a large Jewish population, quite wealthy.
- And they still had their businesses, their homes.
- And they didn't suffer the punishment
- what already the Hungarian Jews did in Hungary.
- So Yom Kippur Eve, they prevailed
- on the Hungarian commandment to let us go into the city.
- And each Jewish family hosted three or four Jewish boys.
- That was the best food we ate a long time because even home,
- we didn't have any food anymore, good food, good, Jewish food.
- Well, the winter was coming.
- And our work was ended by this time.
- So they took us back to Hungary.
- And they discharged the older Jewish people, older people,
- about 25 to 40.
- They were the older ones.
- We were the young ones.
- I was 21.
- And I was army age, military age.
- So they let me go home for two days to see my family.
- And then they sent me to a basic camp, a basic training,
- of course, without weapons, just the basic training and work
- discipline, they called it.
- Namely the Hungarians formed this time work
- squadrons to help the Hungarian army behind the lines,
- just behind the lines, to do the hard labor, the hard work what
- every army requires--
- carrying ammunition, digging ditches, and so forth so on.
- I was sent and spent the spring and summer
- in different Hungarian construction jobs,
- building barracks buildings, digging ditches, and so forth.
- Now, in June 22, 1941, the Russians
- attacked Russia, they move against Russia.
- The Germans?
- I mean the Russians-- the Germans attacked Russia
- and moved against Russia.
- In the fall that year, they drove us, the work battalions,
- the work units through the Carpathian Mountains.
- I don't know if you're familiar.
- Between Poland and Czechoslovakia and Hungary,
- there is a Carpathian Mountains.
- And they drove us through the mountains.
- We walked, marched through the mountains.
- It was late fall, very cold.
- And I don't know if you're familiar with the place
- or heard about it, but terrible mud.
- Poland has mud you never saw or never imagined.
- So we were till our ankles in mud.
- And it was cold weather.
- And it was a horrible march toward the mountains.
- Then we reached the Carpathian Mountains.
- The mountains were full with snow already.
- And we had to pass the mountain passes.
- And we marched through that.
- And the horses pulled heavy loads of ammunition and army
- stuff.
- But even for the horses, it was too hard.
- And they collapsed so to save horses,
- they hitched 10 or 12 Jewish boys to a cart.
- And we had to pull those carts through the mountain passes.
- Of course, lots of us collapsed.
- And some of them died there carrying the loads
- and marching through the passes.
- I found out that the horse is worth more than a Jew.
- Well, I spent three years in Ukraine as a slave laborer.
- I was in places, which may be familiar for older people who
- came from other country, Delyatyn, [PLACE NAME],,
- Vinnytsia, Proskurov, working hard,
- the suffering from the 40 below zero temperature,
- the labor, the punishment, torture
- and cruelty of this soldiers, Hungarian soldiers
- who were selected specifically to that purpose,
- to guard the Jews, were undescribable.
- It will take days or a book to tell you
- all what I went through here.
- But to give you an idea or give you the result,
- consider the fact that they took 60,000 Hungarian Jews
- to the Ukraine and 8,000 came back alive.
- Well, during this time I saw the systematic murder
- of the inhabitants of the Jewish ghettos in the Ukraine.
- You know about it.
- The SS came in, the Sonderkommando
- closed up the ghettos.
- Sometimes they burned the ghettos.
- And most of the time, of course, took out
- the people in the countryside.
- They dig their own ditches.
- And they're shot and killed.
- I don't have to tell you about those.
- It's not my purpose because you read about it.
- You saw it in the movies and probably spoke
- with other survivors who told you all kinds of stories
- what they went through.
- Well, my unit was lucky.
- See, we had Hungarian uniforms with a yellow band.
- And we belonged to the working squadrons
- of the Hungarian army.
- So the Germans didn't touch us.
- Of course, many of us, many comrades
- of mine during this period, those who are not
- able to withstand the terrible cold, the torture,
- and the punishment, perished.
- They died from exposure, cold, hunger, and so on.
- The worst thing was the sadism, the cruelty
- of a man to his fellow human being.
- Many men enjoys suffering, to see or cause suffering.
- And I just give you two examples from the many.
- One time an officer, who hated us,
- we Jews, ask us to climb up a tree.
- It was winter time.
- And we had to climb up the tree.
- And ask us to crawl, like a bird, like a crow.
- Of course, some of us, who didn't crow loud enough,
- he just took his gun and shot them.
- And they fell down like birds from the tree.
- Many of us fell down frozen.
- And he enjoyed that.
- That was his enjoyment.
- That was his fun.
- Another time, I was sent to a stable, to work in a stable.
- Wow, that was a fine assignment because a stable was warm.
- Outside was terribly cold and wind.
- And I was saved from the very cold temperature.
- So this officer, called Homonnai--
- that was his name--
- came-- incidentally, Homonnai was raised--
- he was an orphan--
- and raised by a Jewish family in Hungary.
- You know him.
- He was famous in Hungary because he was an Olympic swimmer.
- So he had made a name for himself.
- He came on a white horse, all right?
- Ordered all the Jews out from the warm stable,
- made us lay down in the snow.
- And he rode his horse over us several times.
- Of course, there were many broken bones.
- And some boys, some workers got broken heads.
- But that was fun.
- That was his enjoyment.
- Well, how was I able to stand it you may ask.
- Well, it's a question of luck.
- But really, I wasn't able to stand it,
- because I had a nervous, temporary nervous breakdown
- once.
- It happened that, as usual, they took us out
- in the woods in subzero temperature there, in Russia,
- to cut woods and carry woods the whole day long, big logs.
- And we did that from mornings of about 6 o'clock
- till the evening.
- And we were dead tired at the end of the day, exhausted.
- And we had a sergeant who was a sadist.
- And about 6 o'clock in the evening,
- we saw the trucks coming to pick us up.
- So we were relieved that finally we can go back to our quarters.
- Instead, he made us squat down and frog jump
- in the snow as tired and, you know, exhausted we were.
- Many of us weren't able to take it anymore
- and just fainted, passed out.
- And among us, myself, I wasn't able to take it anymore.
- I just gave up and went before the sergeant
- and told him, look, it's no sense
- to torture me or us anymore.
- Just shoot us.
- Much easier.
- Why don't you take your gun and put a bullet in my head
- and end my suffering?
- He looked at me and said, a Hungarian bullet
- is too good for a Jew.
- So he handcuffed me and took me to the truck.
- And he said, you will rot, rot to die in a dungeon.
- And he took me in his unit's dungeon.
- There was an engineering unit, the Hungarian engineering unit
- is similar to the American Marines, the toughest
- kind of soldiers.
- And they throw me in the cold dungeon there.
- And I was there.
- I don't know how long time.
- I passed out.
- But luckily, my comrades reported it to our officer.
- And he had enough humanity or whatever coming over him.
- He intervened with the Marine commandant.
- And they let me go.
- They freed me.
- As I said, the abusement and the suffering was indescribable.
- And many people committed suicide, many slave laborers,
- or mutilated themselves just to stay inside the barracks.
- At one time, I dread so much to go out already to the cold
- that when a medic, former medic, offered
- me to inject me with milk, I said, OK, I agree to do that.
- Now, I don't know if you're familiar with the milk
- injection.
- It causes extreme high fever and you get the shakes.
- And with these symptoms, they let me stay in quarters for--
- I was in about two days.
- After two days, I volunteered to go out.
- But I thought even freezing outside is better than
- taking another shot of milk.
- I stay away from milk even since then.
- And after the war, for a long time,
- I had a terrible reaction every time I drink a glass of milk.
- Well, seeing what the Germans did with the Jewish population,
- watching my comrades dying from cold, from torture,
- made me give up any hope that I ever will return to my family,
- to Hungary.
- And the war was going on.
- The years passed.
- And there always was rumors that next week
- or next week or next month, they will come and exchange
- fresh labor, and they take us home.
- But that was just rumor.
- And we almost gave up.
- The end of 1943, the tide of war turned.
- The glorious Germans got pushed back by the Russians.
- And that was the first time I saw
- a beaten, dirty, wounded German crawling back slowly,
- not marching proudly and spick-and-span,
- marching back toward the Hungarian
- and the German frontier.
- The Russians pushed back the Germans.
- And there was a slim hope that maybe somehow
- we are getting back to our country, to our family.
- And I was lucky again.
- By a miracle-- and there was a miracle--
- one day as we marched back, and we were strafed daily
- by the Russian airplanes.
- We got bombarded too.
- They didn't know the difference between Jews or Germans
- on the ground.
- We stopped at the station, and we found a boxcar.
- And they loaded us in a boxcar, thinking
- that they are Hungarian units.
- And we were shipped back to Budapest.
- Well, I said we were lucky.
- We are lucky because, for instance, our brother unit,
- other squadron, who worked next to us in other village,
- before they evacuated the village,
- the Hungarians closed them in, in a barrack, in a compound,
- and dosed gasoline on the building, burned the building
- and the Jews inside.
- And those who tried to escape somehow, break down the door
- and escape, or through the windows,
- they set up some machine guns.
- And the machine gunned them down there in the snow.
- I spoke with one of the survivors from that massacre.
- He was my namesake.
- His name was Egon Haász, not a relative, but the same name.
- He was able to roll in the snow to the bush
- not far from the building, hide.
- And afterward he escaped and joined our unit.
- So I was shipped back to Hungary.
- In February 1944, I was released from the labor unit
- and returned to my family.
- This time already, the Jews in Hungary
- were forced to wear yellow stars on their clothing.
- They were forbidden to walk on the streets.
- They hold any job whatsoever.
- And if they caught somebody on the street,
- they were captured, put in jail, and so forth, and so on.
- The harassment was very, very, very intense.
- But since my family had no income and we had no food,
- I volunteered to go to the city and look for some job.
- And actually, that was dangerous.
- I removed my star from my clothing, went in with a train.
- We lived in our part, I mentioned, far from the city,
- not very far, but in the suburbs.
- And I had to take the train in.
- Now, the trains were constantly checked
- to find Jews hiding or going in the city.
- So I was exposed every day to the danger
- till they capture me and put me in a concentration camp
- or in jail again.
- But I managed for a while to work and supply
- my family with some food.
- In October, and then in May 20, 1944,
- I get a new order from the Hungarian government
- to report to another labor camp.
- This time, they took me to Yugoslavia.
- Yugoslavia already was occupied by the Germans.
- And they took me to a place called Bor--
- spelled Bor, B-O-O-R. Bor was a copper mine.
- They mined copper and used it to supply the German war machinery
- with copper, with copper ore.
- I never forget the sight when I arrived.
- Imagine a huge open mine, deep mine,
- and thousands of thousands of Jews
- working with pick and shovel mining the earth.
- But the frightening thing and an unusual thing,
- and I went through a lot, was the site that since it was hot
- on the [NON-ENGLISH] mountains.
- They worked bare, without any shirts.
- And the yellow star was painted on their skin not to escape.
- Now can you imagine those thousands of men,
- Jewish men, working in an open mine
- there and all having a huge yellow star on the back,
- on their skin, painted on the chest.
- I mean it was an unbelievable sight.
- Well, I was lucky again.
- And this time they sent me about three miles from this mine
- in a work camp where they built a road in the mountain,
- cut the mountain side for the railroad.
- Hitler figured they can transport
- the ore in a straight line from Bor
- to Germany for his factories, for his melters.
- So what we did here we cut the mountains.
- There was the [NON-ENGLISH] mountains, white rocks,
- terrible heat in the summer time and cold evenings.
- And, well, there was a suffering again, just the same as
- in Russia, except here we suffered with heat.
- We had no water.
- There were many accidents, as you know in mining areas,
- and cutting the rock always happens.
- And this time in the breaks, the work breaks, short work breaks,
- I used to make little sketches of the guards, little drawings
- of the guards and give it to them.
- And they send it properly back to their families.
- And one officer, Hungarian officer,
- noticed that and asked me if I'm an artist.
- And I said, yes.
- So he sent me back to the camp, the compound,
- and gave me work in the compound.
- I was supposed to work half a day there.
- And in the afternoons, I was sent out with the guard
- to the mountains to paint scenery for the officer,
- for him.
- This work in Bor lasted till September 1944.
- Now, you heard about Tito's partisans.
- And Tito's partisans, Tito's army,
- was starting to push the Germans from the south back
- toward Germany.
- Fighting went on.
- Every day we saw the liberators coming and bombing.
- The bombing of the Allies were very, very intense
- at that time.
- They dropped ammunition.
- And they dropped food to the partisans, the English did.
- And we saw they come in every morning.
- And I don't have to tell you how glad I
- was when I saw the American aeroplanes
- and the English aeroplanes flying over us,
- knowing that liberation can be too far.
- Well, as I said, Tito was close.
- And they had to make a decision, the Germans,
- what to do about the mine.
- We were under Hungarian guards, but German supervision.
- The Germans moved out, and the Hungarian officer in a panic
- didn't know what to do with 3,000 Jews.
- So he decided to close the Jews in the mine
- and blow up the mine with the Jews in it.
- Luckily, he had no time to do that.
- Tito was too close.
- The partisans were too close.
- And they put us in a death march from Bor back toward Hungary.
- I don't want to describe this much.
- It was an incredible.
- It went on for days and days.
- And the suffering was unbelievable.
- They shot us if we didn't march fast enough.
- Of course, there was no food, and so forth and so on.
- I mean it was a horrible march.
- I don't want to describe that.
- I just want to tell you that one day,
- and it's famous in the story of the Holocaust,
- one day we arrived in a little village called Crvenka,
- in southern Hungary.
- And we rested there.
- We never knew which night they decide to shot us and kill us.
- So we rested there.
- And it happened that the SS unit passed by and asked
- the Hungarian officers and guards who supervised us,
- what are those dirty, filthy people here with beard, bloody?
- What are they?
- What's this here?
- And they said, they are Jews, and we take them
- back to Hungary.
- They were flabbergasted.
- Take them back to Hungary?
- So you just go, save your skin, and we take care of them.
- So they left the.
- Hungarian guards left us.
- And the SS put up two machine guns.
- And 20 by 20, they started to kill us, exterminate us.
- Well, the blood was flowing like water.
- And the bodies piled up.
- I hid myself under a coal pile till the morning,
- about 6 o'clock.
- And they found me.
- And they chased me before the machine gun.
- But how lucky can you be?
- Luck was with me again.
- The German officer, the SS officer came.
- I remember him in a white horse, came in the brickyard.
- And he said, we have to stop this
- because the people in the village are restless.
- They hear the screaming and the crying the whole night.
- Beside, a unit of Tito, a partisan unit is very close.
- You are able to hear their guns.
- And you have to pull out here.
- Whoever is left, the survivors, we take with us.
- And we take out of them on the road.
- Well, there was 300 left of us.
- They killed about 2,700 people there, that night, that day,
- in Crvenka.
- The death march started again.
- And I don't know how many days we walked.
- But I found out the date.
- That was October 6, 1944, when they handed us over,
- the SS handed us over, to the Hungarian unit.
- And surprisingly, the Hungarian officers were very friendly.
- Instead of cursing us, beating us, and abusing us,
- they said, we get you some food.
- And don't worry, we get home.
- We take you home.
- What happened?
- I mean suddenly they changed their attitude toward us.
- Well, we found out that that day,
- October 6, '44, the regent, Ladislaus Nicholas Horthy
- secretly sent a message to the Allies
- to London that he gives up, he surrenders,
- and he want out from the war.
- Naturally, the Germans intercepted his message
- and captured him.
- He was captured.
- And next day, the Hungarian SS commandant, a rabid antisemite
- named Szalasi, took over the Hungarian government,
- the whole government.
- He became the leader of Hungary.
- That was the famous Horthy putsch
- when they switched command, and Szalasi became the leader.
- He immediately sent the remaining labor battalions
- to Germany, to the concentration camps, handed over us
- to the Germans.
- I didn't know, but that was the time
- when they surrendered all Jews in Hungary,
- older people, children, and shipped them to Auschwitz
- to Buchenwald and all the concentration camps
- to extermination.
- But, as I said, I was at that time sent too over Germany.
- And I found myself in Flossenbürg camp, concentration
- camp.
- Now, Flossenbürg was not--
- before it was not an extermination camp.
- It was a camp where they kept political prisoners.
- However, they conducted a test, an experiment on us.
- We came from Yugoslavia.
- It was late fall, end of November.
- It was very, very bitter cold.
- It was a mountainous place, Flossenbürg.
- And they let us stay out a day in the cold.
- And they hosed us down with cold water.
- They wanted to see how long it takes us to freeze
- and how much cold we can withstand,
- probably to find out how to protect
- their soldiers in Russia or some other reasons.
- Anyway, many of us dropped frozen on the ground,
- weren't able to take it.
- Those who survived the day were taken in a room, in a washroom.
- And we were marked with a pencil,
- with a red pencil on our forehead, T and X. Of course,
- we didn't know what we got because.
- We just looked the other guy's mark on his face.
- X meant extermination.
- They are useless.
- T means transport, to take them into another camp.
- As I said, Flossenbürg was not a work or extermination camp.
- I had a T, probably because I spent three years in Russia.
- And I was used to the extreme cold weather
- and survived the ordeal.
- They sent me to Nordhausen.
- And the Nordhausen camp was in the Hartz Mountains.
- And the code name of this camp was Dora, D-O-R-A.
- They had a code name because, in Dora there
- was an underground factory.
- And that was the famous underground factory
- where the Germans manufactured the V-1 rockets, which
- they used against London, against England,
- a fantastic big factory underground.
- And the workers worked in this factory.
- It's not Jewish workers, not only Jewish workers,
- in fact very few Jewish workers, mostly Poles, French, Dutch,
- name it.
- All the people they were able to get from all over Europe,
- they collected them there and let them work in the factory.
- Well, I was about two weeks in the barracks inside.
- They fed us with some soup, milky soup.
- There are even some noodles in it.
- They wanted to feed us up a little bit for work.
- [AUDIO OUT]
- --but are so weak, that the SA, a painter, working for him,
- he drew little pictures.
- It was Christmastime for the block leader.
- And then he took the little pictures, little cards,
- and bribed the guards with it.
- And they were glad to receive those pictures because they
- sent them back to Germany to their families as a Christmas
- present.
- And they found out that I am able to draw.
- And they told me, you Jew, you stay in here,
- stay with the Frenchman and help him draw pictures.
- So I did that.
- And I became from him a double ration, two bowls
- of soup instead of one.
- It was a big deal for me.
- However, after two weeks, when the Germans
- decided that they are not fit to work,
- he told me one night that tomorrow, we'll take them out
- and, you Jews will be get rid of.
- I begged him to save my life.
- He didn't answer me.
- Instead, he told me that he's glad to get rid
- of this miserable band of Jews.
- He'd rather have Yugoslavs, Poles, or German criminals
- in his barrack than us.
- So next morning, they took us out about 6 o'clock
- in the morning.
- It was pitch dark.
- We had a roll call.
- The SS came with wolf hounds and following
- him came a prisoner, a clerk, with the pencil and pad
- and took our numbers.
- Each of us have a number on our chest.
- And he took our numbers.
- He passed me by, took my number, and proceeded
- to the next prisoner.
- And I prayed to God to have a miracle.
- How many miracles can he produce?
- And suddenly, I felt a hand behind me.
- Somebody grabbed me and throw me in a bush nearby in the dark.
- And I heard this block leader whispering in my ear, be quiet.
- So I laid there.
- And I saw the whole unit turning around
- and marched out from the camp.
- I never heard of them again.
- They took in the mountains and killed them.
- Well, after that, he came for me, took me in the barracks.
- Well, you have to imagine this camp--
- I mean concentration camp, it's in Nordhausen.
- That wasn't a small place.
- There was 20,000 people working.
- It was like a town, hundreds of barracks and streets.
- And there was constantly lighted with big spotlights.
- It was light even in the night.
- It's like a town.
- So he-- and prisoners were marching up and down,
- coming from the job, going for the job, from one barrack
- to another and so forth, so on.
- There was a community, a big, big place.
- So he just walked with me to his unit, to his barracks,
- and told me that as long as you work here, I feed you,
- you paint.
- And I take care of you, number wise,
- because he had to count for each people in his barracks.
- The Germans were not fools.
- They had roll calls every day.
- But he managed to do this because he had a night shift,
- sleeping the whole day inside the barracks.
- And in the evening, the other shift came in,
- the day shift came in, so there were exchanges.
- In this particular barrack, the only barracks in the compound,
- we had--
- didn't have to stay roll calls.
- All the other barracks had to come
- outside from the barracks, stay in line, every morning.
- And they counted the people.
- Here, they took his word for it that 120 or 130,
- or whatever they were, were sleeping in there.
- Well, so I worked, as incredible it
- sounds, as illegal in a concentration camp.
- Never heard of it.
- I mean I was illegally in a concentration camp
- because my number was taken already.
- I was dead.
- And I was still alive inside.
- Not long afterwards, the Allies bombed Nordhausen.
- I guess they had the northern side already
- because there was a precision bombing.
- They bombed the SS barracks.
- But they didn't touch the compounds
- where the prisoners were housed.
- Their buildings, the SS buildings, went up in flame.
- And they decided to evacuate the Nordhausen camp.
- So we put on boxcars, in boxcars, first
- and were shipped out from the camp.
- Then, we marched because they stopped the boxcars.
- We had to evacuate the boxcars.
- They put soldiers in the cars.
- And again, we put us in cars again.
- And they stopped us someplace else.
- What happened was that there was a tremendous confusion
- in Germany.
- The Allies came from the west, the Russians
- pushed from the east.
- And the Germans had no place to go anymore, just
- north and south.
- They had a corridor of north and south.
- There was a total confusion.
- Some of them wanted to get rid of the Jews by killing them.
- And some of them wanted to save their skin and run.
- And during this time, of course, we didn't get any food.
- And many, many of the Jews died in the boxcars, on the road.
- But I managed to go with one unit, or shipped with one unit,
- to the famous Belsen camp, Belsen-Bergen camp.
- Those, of course, who were still alive reached the camp.
- Now, when we arrived in the camp,
- I saw Germans only for one day.
- After that, the Germans left the camp.
- They left us for six days there.
- We were exhausted.
- I
- Try to give you an idea, in the six days between the Germans
- leaving Belsen and the Americans,
- in fact the English unit, moving in to Belsen to found us,
- 10,000 people died in the six days,
- mostly from typhoid and starvation.
- I was semi-conscious when the Allies arrived.
- I have very faint memory of it.
- A British unit came in, as they told me,
- and they liberated us in April 15, 1945.
- Thank you.
- [APPLAUSE]
- Thank you.
- We got a few questions.
- Oh.
- I guess we have to be very thankful for all the miracles
- that took place.
- Do we have questions?
- You didn't tell [INAUDIBLE]
- We can't hear.
- They must use the mic.
- I don't understand why [INAUDIBLE]
- Can't hear you.
- I know his family was immediately taken away.
- How come they left your family?
- Munkács was--
- I'll get it.
- That was anyway, still a part of Hungary, all right?
- And the Germans moved in Czechoslovakia.
- I mean they occupied Czechoslovakia.
- And they were the first ones who were killed and destroyed.
- I mentioned in my story that I went
- through that part as a slave laborer
- with the Hungarian army with yellow armband
- and Hungarian uniform and witnessed the execution
- of the Munkács and Czechoslovak, Polish,
- then later on Ukrainian Jews.
- They didn't touch the Hungarians till the very end,
- because, as I said, Hungary was not occupied by the Germans.
- When Szalasi came to power after Horthy was captured,
- then he handed over all the Hungarian Jews.
- And Eichmann saw to it that every day thousands
- and thousands of--
- right.
- Right.
- The first Jews were taken from our part of Hungary
- from Budapest, where the Polish Jews.
- In Poland, they started to kill and exterminate the Jews.
- And they gave an order any Jew who lives in Hungary
- should be captured and deported to Poland, taken to Poland.
- As matter of fact is that when I was in slave labor in Hungary--
- I told you I was in demolition work and construction
- work working for the Hungarian army--
- we had a young boy whose parents were Polish.
- He was a Hungarian boy, but his parentage, his parents
- were Polish and lived not far from Budapest.
- And he was working with us.
- And one day, they told him to come into the commandant
- and send him over to home with a pass.
- He was even happy to go home, get away for a day from work.
- And he was shipped with his family
- to Poland, to that part of Poland.
- And I remember one night, we were
- passing a town, the town where they exterminated Jews.
- Day before, the SS Commandant came in, surrounded the ghetto,
- and destroyed all the Jews.
- And we set a camp not far from the town.
- And we preparing supper, or they prepared supper for us.
- And suddenly, somebody from the woods
- came, a little boy, hey, remember me?
- Who on earth is that from the Polish woods?
- Some guy.
- And it turned out, that was that boy who worked with us a year
- or two years ago in Hungary, Polish boy.
- And he told us that his family was killed.
- And he was able to escape.
- You know they thought he was dead and escaped
- and was hiding in the woods for months and months,
- eating whatever he was able to find.
- And then he saw the Hungarian working unit
- and heard our voices and recognized some of us.
- And he dared to come out to show himself.
- We hid him for a long time.
- Then one day, they found out that we had one more than
- supposed to be.
- And the officer handed over him to the Germans.
- He was killed.
- Just go.
- Did you know-- I mean, [INAUDIBLE]
- did you know how the world hadn't abandoned you?
- Not whatsoever.
- We got propaganda in Nordhausen.
- The loudspeakers gave us German propaganda,
- how gloriously they advance and the war goes beautiful.
- Even the last day when they started to bomb Nordhausen,
- the day before, they said they win the war.
- They are winning.
- Ivan.
- I think it's terribly important for you
- to know how necessary was for you
- go through this painful experience with us.
- So many survivors of concentration camps
- for many, many years were not able to crystallize
- the whole experience and relate the story.
- So many of them try to protect their children
- and never told story to the children
- because it's just so difficult. I think we all appreciate
- or we should appreciate how beautifully you
- told your story.
- Thank you.
- I didn't want to do it.
- I just thought of thousands of thousands of people
- I saw dying.
- And I thought it has to be told because, well, they
- died without any reason.
- They deserve that their story should be told at least.
- People should know about it.
- Unfortunately, you who listen to this
- are not the people who should know about it.
- Younger people should be told and retold
- and warned, mostly warned.
- I mean it can happen.
- But so many parents do not tell their children this story,
- because it's just too hard.
- Well, I told my son.
- And I was very, very, very--
- he formed from the group in his school
- and to study the Holocaust.
- And he was very active in Holocaust studies.
- Yes.
- Is their possibility you'll write a book about it?
- [INAUDIBLE]
- Well, I am not a writer.
- I'm a very bad speaker.
- I'm not a writer.
- But I will marry a wonderful person who is a teacher
- and maybe she decides to write a book or something.
- I don't know.
- [INAUDIBLE] do you have a name for [INAUDIBLE]??
- No.
- I don't remember them.
- They were published.
- There are books, Hungarian books and Hungarian studies.
- A professor, named Brahm, who is a professor in the Columbia
- University, lectures in the university,
- did magnificent books, studies, and truly documented books.
- I have, for instance, home all the documents
- that Eichmann ever issued, in this case,
- how many Jews from where, when.
- All the correspondence is written down and translated
- and said it in English.
- There is a literature.
- I wanted to say that for many years,
- there were no publications about this.
- People didn't talk about it.
- But I think that the last 10 years or less,
- we've even seen documentaries on television.
- Maybe they're not all true, a lot of it is acting.
- But it's coming out now.
- There are books.
- We had two, I think, they're newspapers
- with different systems for written
- books about the Holocaust.
- And more and more, it's coming out now, every few weeks
- or months or something.
- And people are beginning to know that there was a Holocaust, not
- that it's just something that didn't happen [INAUDIBLE]..
- Ida.
- There are also people who are writing
- that there was no Holocaust.
- Unfortunately, well, that's what I said.
- We're dying out.
- The witnesses are gone.
- And you can tell whatever you want.
- [INAUDIBLE]
- I left out the postcard.
- You want a postcard, still.
- Well--
- [INAUDIBLE]
- I mentioned that, in Nordhausen, I
- was painting cards for a Blockführer, a block leader,
- and helped a French painter to draw little pictures.
- Now, where did we get the material for those pictures?
- Naturally, they gassed and killed lots of Jews.
- And in their clothing, there were cards and things
- like that.
- And they collected those postcards.
- And he had a few.
- Not me, but this Frenchman drew a beautiful painting,
- of a modernist building in a park.
- It was gorgeous with trees, an ultra modern building.
- OK?
- And that was really beautiful.
- And he told me that he found this card in a pocket
- of some Jew were killed.
- And that was Haifa, the picture of--
- not Haifa, of Tel Aviv.
- So one day, an SS officer came in.
- And they loved pictures, loved [NON-ENGLISH]..
- They wanted every room, just beautiful.
- So he came in and saw this painting just
- finished by the Frenchman, the beautiful modern building
- with trees and everything.
- This is wonderful.
- Wunderbar.
- What is this?
- And the leader said to him, that's
- how Germany will look after the war.
- And he said, Jawohl.
- That's right.
- Little did he know that was Tel Aviv.
- Even concentration camp has humor.
- Seymour.
- Why don't we [INAUDIBLE] some of this to kids.
- To kids, yeah.
- I did already.
- Yeah.
- Yes.
- How did he react when [INAUDIBLE]??
- Oh, they were quiet like a mouse, not a peep.
- And one of them wrote me a beautiful letter thanking me
- for talking.
- Was it just the higher grades or was it--
- 8th grade.
- 8th grade.
- OK.
- [INAUDIBLE]
- Well, we thank you all for coming.
- And we thank, Steve.
- [APPLAUSE]
- You're very welcome.
- Thank you for listening to me.
- [APPLAUSE]
- It was very well done.
- Well, forgive my accent and my syntax is very bad.
Overview
- Interviewee
- Steve Haas
- Date
-
interview:
1983 March 10
Physical Details
- Language
- English
- Extent
-
1 sound cassette (90 min.).
Rights & Restrictions
- Conditions on Access
- There are no known restrictions on access to this material.
- Conditions on Use
- No restrictions on use
Keywords & Subjects
- Geographic Name
- Budapest (Hungary)
- Personal Name
- Haas, Steve.
Administrative Notes
- Legal Status
- Permanent Collection
- Provenance
- The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum received the tapes of the interview from Geraldine Haas Dubin on January 19, 1995.
- Special Collection
-
The Jeff and Toby Herr Oral History Archive
- Record last modified:
- 2023-11-16 08:16:46
- This page:
- https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn510117
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