Oral history interview with Jack Rosenthal
Transcript
- I'm Randolph Braham, Professor of Political Science
- and Director of the [? Changar ?] Institute
- for Holocaust Studies at the Graduate School of the City
- University of New York.
- This interview with Jack Rosenthal,
- a survivor of the Holocaust in Hungary,
- is videotaped on Wednesday, April 10, 1991.
- Jack, tell me where do you live now?
- Now, I live in Roslyn, Long Island.
- As a matter of fact, I just moved in there
- only a few months ago.
- Yeah.
- What's the address there?
- The address is 212 Augusta Court in Roslyn.
- And your name is now Rosenthal.
- Rosenthal.
- What was your name before?
- Well, my name was Rosenthal, but it wasn't spelled like this.
- It was spelled R-O-Z-E-N-T-A-L.
- And your first name was?
- Yakob.
- Yakob in Romanian and in Hungarian or Yankel in Yiddish.
- But most everybody called me Yankel.
- Yeah, tell me something about your personal background.
- Where were you born?
- Well, I was born in a small village in northern Romania
- in the District of Satu Mare.
- My village was called Comlausa.
- In Romania?
- In Romania.
- As I say, it was a small village.
- And it was on the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains
- in northern Romania.
- What was the total population of that village,
- and how many of that population was Jewish?
- Well, I would have to guess how many people
- the total population I would say maybe were 250 families, maybe,
- out of which 26 were Jewish families.
- Oh, OK.
- Tell me something about your own family.
- Well, my family consisted of my mother my father.
- And I had four brothers and a sister.
- My sister's name was Baile, and my brothers was Mordcha, Dovid,
- [? Labi ?] and Avrum.
- And your mother's and father's names?
- My mother's name was Rivka.
- And my father's name was Chaim.
- I want you to know that this whole village were,
- I would say maybe 20, 22 families out of the 26
- were related, because they all come back.
- They were all the Zelig family.
- It was called Zelig.
- This was going back, I think it was
- in the mid 18th century around 1840
- where [? Meir ?] Zelig came to Comlausa.
- And he had a son, [NON-ENGLISH].
- And [NON-ENGLISH],, again I'm just going through faster.
- [NON-ENGLISH] had a daughter by the name of Leah.
- Leah was my grandmother.
- And Leah had my mother, Rivka.
- So I would say that we go back to our village I don't know
- maybe about six, seven generations who
- were born in that village.
- Yeah.
- What about the community?
- What kind of community did you have in Comlausa?
- Well, most of the people were farmers.
- They were very, very religious people.
- There wasn't any learned people in a sense they
- were very educated, and not even in Jewish,
- they weren't too learned.
- But they knew how to daven, and they got up early
- in the morning like 5 o'clock in the morning.
- They would recite the Tehillim and then go to shul and pray,
- and then go on the farm and work.
- And some of the people were sharecroppers.
- In other words, they would work the fields
- for some other people for a certain cut of the produce.
- We had a lot of land in Comlausa.
- We had about 18 or 20 acres, which is like 12 [NON-ENGLISH]..
- But most of our land was very poor land.
- It had a drainage problem.
- But so we ourselves hardly grew enough bread
- to feed us for the whole year.
- And the community was mostly Orthodox?
- Orthodox, yes.
- Orthodox.
- There were no assimilated--
- No, no, no?
- --Neolog Reformed Jews in that village?
- No, no, no.
- Exclusively Orthodox?
- Yeah.
- I want you to know that we were-- it was isolated.
- Because there were no trains coming that way.
- There was no highways leading to it.
- I'll tell you something else.
- The first time I rode a train was when the Nazis took me
- to Auschwitz.
- Electricity, they brought in electricity there,
- I think it was in the mid '70s.
- So you could imagine it a very isolated place.
- It's a very backward village in other words.
- At any rate, what year were you born?
- What was the date of your birth?
- March 26, 1928.
- 1928.
- Now what kind of education did you have?
- Did you go to Jewish schools primarily?
- Yeah, most of my education was in cheder.
- We had a cheder.
- We had a cheder consisting of all the boys from the village.
- And by the time I was already 11, 12 years old,
- the cheder in Comlausa couldn't hold me,
- because I was like advanced like two or three years advanced.
- So they sent me to the next village
- in [? Bartoch. ?] As far as a secular education,
- we had a school there.
- And I went to school maybe three, four years.
- The first class I went to, about two, three years,
- I always failed.
- Because I never went to school.
- But I think I made about two or three grades, two or three
- grades I made in public school.
- As a child in the 1930s, were you
- aware of any antisemitism in that village or area?
- Well, I remember in the late '30s in Romania,
- they had the Iron Guard, [NON-ENGLISH]..
- They had Cuza, Vaida, Octavian Goga, Zelea Codreanu.
- I remember the parties.
- There was the [? Rotar. ?] I even remember their slogans
- in Romania.
- This goes back to many, many, many years ago.
- And I remember that they started to create in my village,
- they started to create hatred against the Jewish people.
- Because most of the people in my village were farmers.
- And they really, they weren't anti-Semitic.
- Because we were all farmers.
- We were all in this.
- Except when outsiders came in to instigate it.
- So what impact did this anti-Semitic policy of Romania
- have on your family?
- I don't think it had any physical or monetary impact,
- except because I remember distinctly there
- was one day when the King--
- took all-- Zelea Codreanu and his whole gang,
- and they had him shot.
- But there was talk.
- There was talk that they are going
- to burn down all the shuls, all the synagogues.
- And I remember as a child every Monday
- and Thursday we used to go to shul in first,
- and recite a special prayer, so that the government of the Iron
- Guard should fall, and it did.
- It did.
- I think it was in 1938 when they finally--
- Yeah, did you personally suffered any?
- No, no.
- I wouldn't say, from antisemitism, I don't think I--
- I mean they call me Jew or something.
- But no.
- I can't say.
- You weren't beaten up, in other words?
- No, no.
- No, as a matter of fact, I beat up a few Gentiles.
- There's no problem.
- In 1939, '40, how old were you then?
- Let me see.
- You were born in '28.
- I was 11, 12 years old.
- So it was in that time, in 1940, that your little village,
- and the entire area of Northern Transylvania
- were occupied by the Hungarians.
- Well, let me say this.
- You see my parents, my mother and my father,
- they were arrested by the Romanians.
- Supposedly they were accused of being Hungarian spies.
- So they were locked up in Cluj.
- And my mother got five years in jail, my father one year.
- When was that?
- That was in 1939.
- So what happened is in 1940, when the Vienna Diktat
- of Romania and Hungary where Ribbentrop and Ciano in Italy,
- they forced Romania to cede northern Transylvania
- to Hungary.
- I was kind of happy because my parents
- were released from jail.
- So when they came back and I remember,
- I think it was in August of 1940 when
- the Hungarian army marched in.
- And we were on the border, by the way.
- We were on the border.
- So we were the first village where the armies came through.
- Was there any basis to the accusation
- against your parents?
- Well, let me say this to you.
- In an American court of law, there would be no basis.
- But over there, they were accused.
- They were accused because my mother,
- somebody came from the other side, from the Hungarian side.
- And they brought a Hungarian newspaper.
- And they gave it to my mother.
- And my mother read it, and somebody saw her.
- So how did she get the paper?
- So I think this is how it started.
- But I really don't know the complete details.
- But I do remember when they were locked up,
- they were in jail because.
- We were six children, and all of us
- were given to various families they should take care
- on us, because we were small and we couldn't take care
- on ourselves.
- Yeah.
- What was your first impression about the Hungarian occupation
- of your village?
- Well, I remember when the Hungarians came in,
- there was like three days and three nights,
- the armies kept on marching, and marching, and marching.
- I didn't know where they took so many troops.
- They were well fed, the Hungarian army.
- They were pretty well mechanized.
- Even so, they had horses, and they drew the artillery pieces
- on horses.
- But I was very impressed as a child
- to see such a mighty army come through our village.
- Yes.
- Tell me something about the first two years
- of life under the Hungarian rule in Comlausa.
- That is between 1940 and '42.
- Well, let me say this.
- First, I remember as a child going to school.
- I'm talking about in secular school.
- And the teacher asked us a question
- who were our ancestors.
- And of course, being I've gone to a Romanian school,
- so I said [NON-ENGLISH].
- So he beat me up, because it was [NON-ENGLISH]..
- I had different ancestry already,
- because I knew which system came in.
- We went to school.
- And again, I don't remember any overt antisemitism, even
- in the '40s or '41, no.
- No.
- But you probably are aware of the fact
- that the Hungarians passed anti-Jewish laws in 1938
- in Hungary, then in 1939.
- And these Hungarian laws were applied to the Jews
- in northern Transylvania.
- So did your parents feel the consequences
- of these anti-Jewish laws?
- No, we didn't, for a simple reason
- because most of those laws had to do about the Jews not
- allowed to go to college, or they couldn't have stores,
- so they couldn't be in certain commerce.
- And the people in my village were not involved.
- They didn't go to schools, or to higher education,
- or they didn't have fancy stores.
- So we were not involved.
- But in 1942, in the beginning of 1942,
- that was a different story.
- Because what happened is my father
- served in the Romanian army, and he was in the artillery.
- And he was very good as an artillery man.
- But the Hungarians, when they came in,
- they didn't allow Jews to carry arms.
- They took my father into a work battalion, which
- was called munkaszolgalat.
- And they was taken away from us.
- We were small children.
- And he was about three, four months in Hungary.
- And I think in the middle of 1942,
- he was sent up to the Ukrainian front.
- I want you to know one thing.
- Once he left us, I never heard from him again.
- I never know where he is, what happened to him.
- I heard stories.
- I heard a story about he was in a hospital
- when the Hungarian army burned down the hospital
- with everybody in it.
- But I never, never heard from him again, never.
- He was, as I said, he was in the work battalions.
- And also myself, being already 12 years old,
- I was in the Levente.
- Levente were like the Nazi youth.
- I don't know how to describe them.
- It's a combination of Boy Scouts and everything.
- And I had to serve in the Levente once a week,
- one day a week.
- And there they trained us, by the way, with rifles and so on.
- I could still recite to you every part
- of an Hungarian rifle.
- I could take it apart and put it together.
- Also what happened is they passed a law that any Gentile,
- if he wants to claim land, the only thing he had to do,
- it was called [NON-ENGLISH],, I think the word was called
- [NON-ENGLISH].
- He had to apply with a paper to the government
- stating that this Jew is not working his own land.
- And based on that statement, he could take away
- the land from the Jew without any compensation.
- My grandfather, he must have been maybe 92, 93 years old.
- And they were farmers.
- And I told you before, he was born in my village,
- and his father was born in my village.
- The land went down from parents to son, and so on,
- for generations.
- We were attached to the land very much.
- The land was part of us, because that's all we had.
- We worked the land and we grew food.
- And good enough, they took away his land.
- And I remember one day me and him, we went down to see.
- He had about eight acres of land there,
- where the Gentile who claimed the land,
- he was already making hay on the land.
- And my grandfather told him, get off my land.
- And he said, no.
- This is already my land.
- This is not your land no more.
- And he was so heartbroken that when we came back, he told me,
- go to the shochet next village and call him over,
- he said, because I'm going to die.
- I don't want to live.
- I don't want to live in a place where
- they could take my land away.
- So I went for the shochet.
- He came over.
- And he said [NON-ENGLISH] with him.
- And by the way, that night he died.
- He died from heartbreak.
- He was heartbroken.
- Yeah, let's go back to your father.
- He was mobilized into labor services,
- you said, sometime in '42.
- In the beginning of '42.
- Early in '42.
- Yeah.
- And he was sent to the Ukraine, where he was--
- He was sent to the Ukraine.
- And the only thing I remember is a telegram came to us in 1943.
- And I told you before, I never heard from him again.
- I could even quote to you in Hungarian the telegram exactly,
- if you want to hear it.
- But the telegram said, [HUNGARIAN] It's called
- the town of [PLACE NAME] in the Ukraine,
- there where he disappeared.
- And this is the only thing we heard about it.
- In other words, they inform you, we
- are sorry to inform you that your father,
- or Mr. Rozental disappeared somewhere in [PLACE NAME]
- In [PLACE NAME]
- Without any trace.
- Without any trace.
- So you assume that he was either killed or--
- I assumed all along that he must have been taken prisoner
- by the Russians, on the Russian front.
- I was hoping.
- I was always hoping that he was taken prisoner.
- But that wasn't the case.
- So, the last time you met him was in '42?
- The last time I saw him is when he left us in 1942.
- I tell you it was in February of 1942.
- And who provided for your family in the absence of your father?
- Well, I was the oldest.
- At 12?
- Yeah.
- Yeah.
- All my-- I was the oldest.
- That's by the way why I'm alive, because I
- was the oldest in my family.
- And I did a little business here and there.
- At that young age?
- That's right.
- Yeah.
- As a matter of fact, I had a trade.
- I could take whiskey.
- I could distill whiskey.
- So that was my trade.
- And we did pretty--
- I mean under the circumstances.
- Americans call it moonshining.
- Moonshining, exactly.
- OK.
- So, tell me something about the life
- of your family between 1942 when your father was taken away
- until March 19, 1944, when the Germans occupied Hungary.
- What was life in the village like?
- '42 was a big famine in our village.
- I think the reason being because most of the food
- was taken out from our village, and shipped to the front.
- I remember the cows, the cattle, everything was taken out.
- And I tell you it was a famine.
- It was a famine that I'll never forget.
- People would die on the street.
- They didn't have what to eat.
- My mother, I remember she used to make,
- what they call in America, they call it kasha.
- She used to rub the kasha against the stone
- and make flour out of it, and she baked some cakes, flour,
- whatever it is.
- A famine is a terrible thing, because the only thing
- you think about is food.
- Day and night, you only think about food.
- So it was terrible.
- 1942 was terrible.
- 1943 surprisingly was a good year.
- 1943, for some reason, there was a lot
- of fruits growing in our village.
- And there was a lot of the fields,
- they yielded a nice crop.
- And I'll tell you something.
- Nobody bothered us in 1943.
- It was like the quiet before the storm.
- 1943 was OK.
- It was OK.
- In 1944, in the beginning of 1944, was quiet too.
- But my mother decided that I should go into Satu Mare,
- and I should learn a trade.
- And I learned a trade to be a locksmith, [NON-ENGLISH]..
- And I worked for a Hungarian in Satu Mare.
- And he was, by the way, the head of the Nyilas,
- which is the Hungarian Nazi Party.
- But he was very nice to me.
- I worked.
- I worked hard.
- And all of a sudden, in March 19, 1944, I went to work.
- And the whole town of Satu Mare was full of German soldiers.
- They came in, and they occupied Hungary.
- And when they occupied the Satu Mare,
- they came in with trucks, and with tanks, and with Jeeps,
- and they parked all over the sidewalk and all
- over the street.
- And I walked in, and I went to work.
- And there was one German who had a car broken.
- His car was broken.
- So he came into my boss to have the car fixed.
- And since I spoke a little Yiddish, I understood German.
- And he explained me what has to be done.
- And then he asked me where there is a restaurant.
- I took him to the [? Panoni ?] in Satu Mare,
- and I was sitting on the fender of the car.
- And we didn't know what's going to happen.
- We didn't know what's going to happen.
- But then a law came out maybe a few days later
- that no Jew is allowed to travel on a bus,
- and no Jew was allowed to leave from one place
- to another place.
- And at that time, I took the bus.
- I wanted to go back to Comlausa.
- But they wouldn't allow me on the bus anymore.
- So I walked back.
- I walked back, and that was exactly
- before Passover of 1944.
- How long a distance between Satu Mare and Comlausa?
- I would say it's about 18 miles or 30 kilometers.
- Of course, at that time, it was known as Szatmárnémeti,
- no longer Satu Mare.
- Satu Mare, then it was known as Szatmárnémeti
- Szatmárnémeti.
- In Yiddish, Satmar, I believe.
- And the famous rabbi comes from Satmar.
- Satmar Hasidim, yeah.
- At any rate, tell me something about the first few weeks
- of the German occupation.
- OK.
- So how did that affect your village?
- Well, so now I went back.
- And it was Passover.
- And we heard stories that the Germans
- are trying to arrest Jews.
- By the way, a few Jews were arrested in my village too,
- and they were taken away.
- They were called the communists.
- They were called the political leaders or something.
- And they were taken away.
- And we heard stories that as a matter of fact,
- we were afraid to have this--
- we didn't even have a Seder, because we were
- afraid to stay in the home.
- So at night we went out to sleep by the Gentiles,
- with our neighbors, with our non-Jewish neighbors.
- And we knew there is problems.
- But we still didn't to what extent.
- So right after Passover, the next morning,
- there was what they call in America the town crier.
- This guy, he was the Sheriff like in Comlausa.
- And he had a big drum.
- And whenever there was an announcement,
- he would hit the drums.
- So everybody would come out from the house
- to listen to the announcement.
- And he announced that all Jews over 16 years old
- should go to the synagogue.
- Then about half an hour later, he came back
- and he said the first announcement is not valid,
- because he didn't say it right.
- He said that everybody-- men, women, and children,
- should go to the synagogue immediately.
- Within a half an hour, they should go to the synagogue.
- So we all went to the synagogue.
- As soon as we went to the synagogue, the police came.
- And they locked the synagogue.
- They locked it.
- Now, I want you to know that we had a cow.
- And we had some chickens and stuff like this.
- They had to be fed.
- The cow had to be milked.
- And here you are in the synagogue.
- I mean somebody is supposed to take care of things.
- So my mother told me, better go sneak out
- and see what's happening there.
- But as I went out from the synagogue,
- I saw a Romanian taking the cow, my cow,
- and he was leading it out from my stable.
- He was taking it away.
- So I didn't look for trouble.
- So I thought to myself, since everybody, at least the police
- may think that I'm still in Satu Mare.
- So I ran away.
- I ran into the hills.
- I ran into the hills.
- And I was staying in the hills for a couple of days
- and nights.
- But I couldn't take it, because the pressure was too much.
- I was all alone in the hills.
- I was during the day I was staying under a shrub.
- And at night, I came down to the village.
- People would give me some bread, the Romanian people there.
- And the pressure was unbearable.
- I thought that everybody is looking for me.
- I had a feeling like I'm a fugitive.
- Everybody is looking for me.
- So then one morning, I seen a lot of cars and horses,
- and people on the horses, Jewish people,
- going through my village.
- So I decided to follow those people to see
- where they are being taken.
- And I was following alongside the road.
- And they were taken to Nagyszolos Nagyszolos
- was called Sevlus in Czechoslovakia,
- and today it's part of Russia, which is called Vynohradiv.
- They were taken there.
- There was a ghetto.
- And when I saw, so I knew that the Jews
- are being taken to this place.
- And so I started to come back to Comlausa.
- But I had a problem, because you weren't allowed
- to go from village to village.
- In addition, every Jew was supposed to carry a star.
- He was supposed to have a star here, a yellow star,
- a yellow badge.
- Here, I'm outside my village.
- I haven't got a badge.
- I have the badge.
- But if they would see me walking around like this,
- they would take me.
- They would do something to me.
- And I want you to know that the streets were
- by the Hungarian police, and also
- by the Levente, which is the Boy Scouts.
- They were 16, 17, 20, 19 years old.
- And they were very rough.
- They were thugs because they were inflamed against the Jew.
- So what I did I took my jacket with a yellow star,
- and I folded it up, and I carried it on my hand.
- And I didn't go on the main road.
- But I came to the side of the road.
- And little by little, I worked myself back,
- back to my village.
- When I came back, I went up to the hills again.
- But again, the pressure was too much.
- So I decided to go and give myself up.
- And I'll never forget when I came down from the hills,
- there was a gypsy boy who was living in my village.
- And he begged me.
- He said to me, listen, don't go there.
- He said, you better come and stay with us.
- And I could have stayed there.
- But I missed very much my family.
- So I went back.
- And I came back.
- By this time the people weren't locked up in the synagogue
- anymore.
- They were locked up in the school, in the schoolhouse.
- When I came back, I gave myself up.
- They threw me in with the rest of the people there.
- I felt very good because it was like a relief to be back.
- In other words, before they were sent to Nagyszolos or Sevlus,
- they were first transferred from the synagogue
- to the local school.
- The local school, yeah.
- Yeah.
- That was I believe the village ghetto, the first step.
- Yeah, that was the first.
- There they were concentrated.
- There they were concentrated.
- Outside the police were watching the school outside.
- But the local people would come to us,
- and they would give us food.
- Yeah.
- You know?
- Do you remember what agency of the Hungarian government
- did the rounding up of the Jews?
- No.
- Was it the gendarmerie?
- The gendarmerie, yeah, the csendors.
- Yeah.
- Now, they were the ones with the feathers.
- They had the black hats with the feathers.
- The gendarmes.
- The gendarmes.
- Yeah.
- Do you have an idea as to what was
- one of the objectives of rounding up
- the Jews in the school and the synagogue?
- What happened to the valuables of the Jews--
- money, jewelry at that time?
- Now, at this point, by the way, I know what you're asking me.
- Because what happened now, before we
- were taken to the ghetto, they were
- kept on asking us, who has money, jewelry,
- worthwhile articles, or whatever,
- they should give it up under the pain of death.
- They were threatening everybody to give up everything.
- But this didn't happen yet in my village.
- This happened when he took us into the main ghetto.
- As a matter of fact, before they let us into the main ghetto,
- there was like a building where the men
- were staying in one line and the women in another line.
- And they were being searched, body
- searched, each and every body, each and every one.
- I remember my mother had a golden ring like.
- And she buried it in there.
- It was a little thing.
- She buried it.
- As a matter fact, after the war I went to look for it.
- I couldn't find it no more.
- But anybody that had any valuables had to give it up.
- And this, by the way, was a constant cry by the police.
- Every day, maybe two or three times a day,
- they would go through the ghetto and say
- anybody that has money, jewelry, valuables should give it up.
- Give it up, just constantly.
- When you say ghetto, you mean the ghetto of Sevlus
- now, of Nagyszolos.
- Yeah, now what happened is this.
- When we were in the school, we were all
- gathered in the school.
- Now one day, they told all the Gentile people, the Romanians
- from my village, that whoever has horses and carts
- to come to the school.
- And they lined up the horses and carts.
- This was a means of transportation to the ghetto.
- And when we came out from the schoolhouse,
- and we were ready to mount the horses and the carts,
- there was another transport coming from [? Tutz. ?] There
- was a village called [? Tutz ?] near Comlausa.
- And there was a big line of cars and people sitting there.
- In the first car was the [NON-ENGLISH],,
- the rabbi of [? Tutz. ?] And he was carrying a Torah,
- and he was sitting there.
- And when he saw us, we were about to be loaded
- onto the carts and everything.
- So he said to us, [NON-ENGLISH].
- Jews, we are going to meet the Messiah.
- The messianic age has arrived.
- Because the mashiach is going to come.
- The whole world is supposed to be turned upside down.
- And I'll tell you.
- If ever the world was turned upside down, that was the time.
- What was the distance between Comlausa and Nagyszolos?
- I would say about 12 miles.
- Was it closer than Satmar?
- It was closer, yeah.
- See what happened is even so we were
- belonged to the district of Satu Mare or Satmar,
- when the Hungarians came in, they redistricted that area.
- And instead of belonging to Satu Mare,
- we were belonging to Ugocsa.
- Ugocsa [NON-ENGLISH] which is Sevlus was the capital
- of the Ugocsa district.
- All right, in other words, the Jews of Comlausa
- were transferred to the larger concentration entrainment area
- of Nagyszolos.
- Nagyszolos, right.
- Nagyszolos.
- And how long were you in that ghetto
- in Nagyszolos approximately?
- In Sevlus, they took a part of the city
- where there was a big synagogue there in a cemetery
- and they barricaded it around.
- And all the non-Jews moved out.
- And the ones that came in, we were all put into that spot,
- to that which was the ghetto, the ghetto was of Sevlus.
- I'll tell you when the Nazis came in, it was March 19.
- On April 15, we were taken to the synagogue, as I told you.
- And about a week later, we were already
- in the ghetto of Sevlus.
- And May 15, I'll tell you exactly it.
- Was May 19, May 19, the first transport from Sevlus
- left for Auschwitz already.
- So it was very fast.
- In other words, about a month.
- About a month, right.
- We were in ghetto about a month, about a month.
- Yeah.
- Just very briefly, what was life like in the ghetto
- of Nagyszolos?
- First of all, there was a lot of overcrowding.
- We were put into one room.
- I can't even imagine there was hardly any room to sleep there.
- And the families were just put together.
- And for latrines, we had to dig like trenches for latrines.
- But I remember distinctly what bothers me
- to this day, whenever I think about it, is the children.
- There was no food.
- And I remember the children crying.
- And this bothers me.
- Because what happened is when we grew up,
- we were taught when we get up in the morning.
- We had to recite a prayer which is called Modeh Ani.
- If you don't recite the prayer, you cannot eat.
- So automatically, when we got up,
- we would recite the prayer of Modeh Ani.
- So the children didn't eat.
- And there was a woman.
- And she said, all right, did you say the Modeh Ani?
- So she would recite with them the prayer of Modeh Ani.
- But she made it a very long prayer.
- She dragged it out like for a half an hour or 40 minutes.
- Thinking by the time she'll be finished
- with the prayer for the children,
- the children will forget that they are hungry.
- And this is something which I remember very distinctly,
- and it's a very painful thing to remember.
- You were an adolescent of 16, I believe, at the time.
- Pardon?
- You were an adolescent of 16.
- At that time, I was about 16, yeah.
- What do you remember about the administration of the ghetto,
- for example, Jewish leaders.
- Yeah, OK.
- The ghetto, they were taken out, the men,
- and we were sweeping the floors of Sevlus
- and we were doing some work outside,
- and all kinds of work outside.
- And the police, the Hungarian police, were very, very rough.
- They were like sadists.
- There was maybe two or three German officers in uniform
- that he stood at the administration building
- in the ghetto.
- And that's it.
- That's it.
- Then there was talk.
- There was one guy who was like--
- he was the head of the Jewish--
- The Jewish Council?
- The Jewish Council, yeah.
- And then one day, he told us that we
- are going to be taken to Madagascar, which is in Africa.
- And then there was rumors that we
- are going to be taken to [? Dunantul. ?] Then there
- were rumors that we are going to be exchanged
- for German prisoners of war in the next day.
- So what they did, they took the ghetto
- and they divided it into three sections.
- The first section, in the back, the first,
- they took out the first day, the first Friday.
- Before we go on to the deportation,
- what about the soup kitchens?
- Were there any organized feeding?
- No.
- No, no.
- There was no feeding.
- No.
- The only thing, no, we didn't have absolutely no organization
- as far as feeding.
- What we had, what people brought with them,
- and something like this.
- Yeah.
- Were there any casualties, deaths, suicides that you--
- Not that I remember, no.
- You don't remember?
- No.
- All right so Nagyszolos was, in other words,
- the concentration entrtainment center for the Ugocsa county
- communities.
- You call it an entrainment center
- because you know what happened.
- But we didn't know.
- When we got there, the reason they took us
- to Nagyszolos because it was near the railroad station,
- so we should be--
- but there we were gathered into the ghetto of Nagyszolos
- Now, as I said to you before, the ghetto was
- liquidated in three parts.
- The first went on May 19, 1944.
- May 19, it was the first section.
- And I'll tell you I looked out in the morning
- and I saw a mass of people moving,
- maybe I don't know, 2,000 or 3,000.
- And that's a lot of people.
- Men, women, and children--
- women, they were carrying, everybody
- was carrying the pillowcases.
- For some reason in Europe, the people
- always took along their pillowcases and the covers,
- the nightly covers.
- It reminds me, my grandchildren always walk around
- with a blanket that's a security blanket.
- So because they knew no matter where they go,
- they will have to have bedding, someplace to sleep and to keep
- warm.
- So they took along all the bedding.
- And people were loaded with bedding--
- women and small children.
- It was a sight.
- It's very hard to describe it, because it
- was a mass of misery, a mass of misery,
- just moving, just walking.
- Nobody was talking.
- They were just walking, surrounded by police,
- and they were going.
- Was the gendarmerie involved at the?
- Yeah, the gendarmes, they were on the side,
- alongside every 100, 200 feet was a gendarme.
- And he urged them on, on, on.
- But the people didn't talk.
- Everybody was doubled over.
- The women, they were carrying with children, with beddings,
- and they were moving, and moving, raggedy.
- They were just moving.
- And they were taken to the main synagogue there.
- And from the main synagogue, they
- were led out through the town.
- I mean I could just tell you, I don't
- know what happened to them.
- But I tell you what happened now after May 19, that
- was the first transport.
- A week later, exactly was on a Friday, May 26,
- the ghetto was liquidated on a Friday.
- The first it was May 19.
- The second was May 26.
- That was my turn, my family's turn.
- And we were taken out to the synagogue.
- Also the same, of course, I didn't see my column
- because I was part of the column already.
- We were taken out of the main synagogue.
- And from there through the town, nobody said nothing.
- We were just walking, walking to the railroad station.
- We went to the main railroad station there.
- And train, into what kind of cars?
- When we got to the railroad station,
- by the way, when we were going out to the train already,
- we were sprinkled with German soldiers already,
- here and there, a few maybe, a few German soldiers there.
- There were cars, they were like box cars.
- In the car, in one end above there
- was a little slit of a window, a window
- I would say about 10 inches high,
- and about 20 inches long, 2 feet long, you know?
- And there were barbed wires over there.
- That was the only opening there in the car.
- In other words, they were freight cars?
- Freight cars.
- And they had two doors, sliding doors.
- And everybody, as a matter of fact,
- the police helped us into the car
- because it was a very high platform.
- In the car, there was a few loaves of bread.
- There was two pails of water.
- And there were some pails for sanitary reasons there.
- And they start packing in the cars.
- There was no chairs or anything like that.
- They just pushed us into the cars.
- About how many in a car?
- The car was packed tight.
- Nobody, as a matter of fact, people
- were fighting there because they were
- like pushed together, like sardines, crammed together.
- We were all standing, you know.
- Some of them were sitting down.
- I want you to know something that in my village,
- my grandmother's mother was still alive.
- My great grandmother, because I told you, my grandfather died.
- So she was alive.
- She must have been about 95 years old.
- But she prepared her [NON-ENGLISH],,
- her death shrouds.
- She sewed by herself by hand.
- And the only thing she took along with her
- is the death shrouds.
- And she was part of this train.
- And I remember all the kids there, we were all, everybody,
- everybody from my village was in that car, and more.
- OK.
- And that freight car was directed towards Auschwitz.
- How long did it--
- All right.
- The freight car, I don't know where it was directed.
- The freight car was packed in the freight,
- and it was like, I would say around maybe 11:00, 12 o'clock,
- the train pulled out.
- And we kept on going.
- We went through barracks.
- And we went through, or we went to barracks.
- And we kept on going.
- We didn't know where we were going.
- We kept on going.
- But all of a sudden, that night, we
- came to a town called Kosice, Kaschau.
- And somebody in the car made a remark.
- He said, you know something?
- I think we are going towards Poland.
- And if we go towards Poland, then our fate
- is not going to be very good.
- Because we heard rumors what they did to the Jews in Poland.
- But of course, we didn't know.
- We didn't know where we were going.
- But all along, in every stop where the train stopped,
- the police would pass by outside,
- and they would say anyone that has jewelry, valuables, kept
- on saying this over, and over, and over, and over again.
- And then it was around 12 o'clock
- at night, the first day.
- They said, again, this whole business.
- And the very next few minutes, or maybe half an hour later,
- we heard the same story now in German.
- Anybody with valuables, that night we
- were taken over strictly by the German army, strictly.
- There were no more Hungarians.
- Because this was on the old Slovakian Hungarian border,
- Kosice.
- And they took us out, and they took over.
- And you see what happened.
- Between the trains, between the boxcars,
- there was like a little boot, like a little booth.
- In the booth, was a soldier.
- Every boxcar at the end of the boxcar was a booth.
- There was a soldier.
- And they were watching the trains.
- And of course, the boxcars, they were
- closed and sealed and locked.
- So from Kassa, or Kosice, as it's known in Slovakian,
- how long did it take for you to go to Auschwitz?
- Well, from Kosice, the next day, we were going.
- I don't know where we were.
- I didn't know where we were.
- But I was-- we were in Slovakia.
- I remember pulling myself up as a kid,
- and looking out through that barbed wire,
- little slit in the car.
- And the fields were green, beautiful.
- The sun was outside beautiful, very nice day.
- The countryside was very nice.
- But I didn't know where I was.
- And we kept on going all day long that day,
- and all night that night.
- The second day in the morning, we came.
- I looked out.
- And I saw there was a big station.
- And that was Krakow.
- It was already Poland.
- That was Krakow.
- And about that afternoon, we arrived in Auschwitz.
- All right.
- In Auschwitz, you arrived some time early in June, I believe,
- or late May.
- No, no, no.
- No, I arrived in May.
- May 28.
- May 28.
- We left May 26, and May 28 we arrived.
- As the matter of fact, it was the first day Shavuot.
- The first day Shavuot in 1944, we arrived in Auschwitz.
- So all right, so we're there now.
- As soon as we arrived there, the train stopped.
- And we stopped there for about an hour or two hours,
- and nothing.
- And all of a sudden, they opened up the doors.
- It was a fresh air came in.
- It was nice.
- And I saw people walking around in striped uniform,
- like prisoners.
- They were Jewish people.
- They were the ones who unloaded the trains.
- And everybody was saying, get out of the trains
- fast, fast, fast.
- And everybody was going out of the trains.
- And we all had our bundles there.
- And everybody was busy riding up on the bundles,
- riding on the bundles.
- The addresses, because they told us we are going to go.
- They're going to take us away, so we
- thought that the bundles are going
- to wait for us over there.
- So we should all identify our bundles.
- We all put on our name and address where we came from,
- and everything, and everybody was
- busy writing on the bundles.
- And then we got out of the train.
- There was an announcement.
- As a matter of fact, those prisoners who unloaded us,
- they said, listen, men over 16, between 16
- I think and 50, 55 or something, 16 to 55,
- should stop in one side.
- Women between 16 and 55 in another side.
- Any woman with children below 16 should
- keep on going left, right?
- And the columns were moving, like we
- were going into our columns.
- And I saw my mother for the last time.
- And she was like crying.
- I think she sense something is not right here.
- And my sister-- and yeah, I had my brother with me, Mordcha.
- But they kept on saying under 16 should go with the mothers.
- So I told my brother to go to my mother.
- And he went to my mother.
- And now I remained alone.
- And of course, that was the last thing I ever saw of them.
- What was the fate of those who were under 16 and above 55?
- All right.
- All right, now between 16 and 55, my column,
- we were moving, moving, and there
- was a line of officers, Mengele and his gang.
- And there was one guy there.
- And he had a baton.
- And he looked at you.
- And he went like this, so you went this way.
- If he went like this, you went this way.
- He just kept on going like this, like this.
- Now, the line was moving up fast.
- And by the way, when he made that decision,
- to the left meant death.
- This way meant work.
- You know what I mean?
- We didn't know, this way, this way, you know.
- And I was shown to the right.
- I went to the right.
- And I kept on going.
- About what percentage of the people were selected to live,
- that is to work?
- To work?
- Approximately.
- I can't tell you.
- I never thought about it, but I would say from the 126 people
- that we came in there, I wouldn't say that 126,
- because some of our people were already in the munkaszolgalat.
- I would say roughly maybe 15%.
- I would guess, I'm not too sure.
- I would guess.
- 50% survived?
- 15%, 15%.
- Survived?
- No, no, no, that were sent to work.
- Because I remember everybody that
- was sent from my transport.
- And the remainder were sent--
- The remainder, they went to the left.
- And those who went to the left, I
- didn't know then but I was to find out
- that they were all gassed.
- And my Yahrzeit-- by the way, I keep Yahrzeit the second day
- Shavuos, because the first day I saw I'm alive.
- But from what I know and you know
- that, because you're a professor of history and the Holocaust.
- You are world renowned.
- You know that most of those people who arrived
- were killed the same day.
- All right, say, how long did you personally stay in Auschwitz?
- OK.
- Now I was driven to a place.
- And they put us into a barrack, which was called a block.
- And that was in the gypsy camp, because the Gypsies were
- in Auschwitz, Zigeunerlager.
- And the Gypsies, we were packed into that thing over there,
- packed in.
- You couldn't breathe.
- You couldn't breathe.
- There was hardly any room.
- Because people, they dropped dead,
- because they couldn't breathe.
- I as a youngster, I was young.
- I even had a rough time just breathing there.
- In the middle of the night, they opened up the barracks
- and they came in with sticks and stones.
- And they were beating the people.
- They were-- not the Germans.
- They were criminals in the camps, the kapos.
- And they were beating the people, beating them.
- And a lot of them were killed.
- They were killed physically killed in there.
- And they kept on pushing, pushing, pushing.
- And they pushed me all the way back.
- That was that night.
- The following day, people--
- we didn't have no water.
- We didn't have no bread.
- And people were starting to get haggard and drawn.
- Because the ordeal was already rough,
- going through the transport and everything.
- And I saw my mother's brother, [PERSONAL NAME]
- and another brother, my mother's brother, Yankl.
- They were there.
- And they looked to me very haggard.
- As a matter of fact, that night, [PERSONAL NAME]
- he picked me up in the barrack, and he
- told me to look out, because the windows were on the roof.
- And I looked out the window.
- He asked me, what do you see?
- And I saw the whole sky was aflame.
- The whole sky was-- you couldn't see, just flames.
- What happened in Birkenau, because this was in Birkenau,
- they were burning people, not only in the crematorium.
- They were burning them in pits, because the crematorium
- couldn't handle all of it.
- I didn't know that.
- But I saw the flames.
- I said [PERSONAL NAME] the flames
- are leaping into the sky.
- The sky is aflame.
- And he told me.
- He said, those are people.
- They are being burned.
- Of course, I couldn't believe it.
- And by the way, [NON-ENGLISH] went crazy.
- He went off his mind the next day.
- He was crazy.
- Because he went into his mind.
- And I never seen him again, neither
- did I see my other brother.
- But one thing I'll tell you.
- In Birkenau, while I was there, the stench
- of flesh, burning flesh, was constantly with you.
- Because that's all you smelled is
- flesh-- burning, burning flesh.
- So when were you taken away from Auschwitz?
- I was in Birkenau a couple of days.
- And then we were marched to Auschwitz,
- which is the concentration camp of Auschwitz.
- And I came into Auschwitz, and I never
- forget, as I made a right turn to the gate,
- I saw a sign Arbeit macht frei.
- And I was kind of content, because I
- wasn't afraid to work.
- I was working.
- And I thought, if I'm going to work, I'm going to be free.
- But that was the sign there.
- And they put me in Auschwitz.
- And I was in Auschwitz a couple of days.
- I don't know, maybe a week or so in Auschwitz,
- in the camp of Auschwitz.
- And even there they were looking for money.
- Because we had already new clothes.
- You see, in Birkenau they gave us
- clothes, the striped clothes, the prisoners clothes.
- And in Auschwitz, what they did they took off the shoes.
- We still had our original shoes.
- And they ripped off the sole, to see whether we
- have money in the sole.
- But that night in Birkenau, by the way, before I forget,
- that night they told us to stay in line on alphabetical order.
- So my name is Rosenthal, so my number was pretty far up.
- And I stayed in line maybe a couple of hours.
- It was maybe around 2 o'clock in the morning by the time
- I went up.
- And there were guy, and they had ink,
- and like a pin or something.
- And everybody, they all told us to go like this here,
- to hold our hands like this.
- What's the number that you have there?
- What's the number.
- The number is, yeah, so what they did they went ahead,
- and they tattooed in a number.
- And my number was A11832.
- And by the way, I said, I stayed in line, R, Rosenthal.
- My name wasn't Rosenthal no more.
- This was my number.
- That was your new identity.
- My new identity, yeah.
- Nobody ever called me by my name again.
- That was my number.
- So from there, I went to Auschwitz.
- And there in the camp in Auschwitz, I stayed there.
- I don't remember exactly how long.
- And then they took us.
- And they formed a big column from Auschwitz.
- And they chased us, and we were going
- until we reached a place not far from Auschwitz, maybe about 2
- or 3 kilometers, maybe 2 miles, a place called
- Buna, Buna-Monowitz.
- And Buna was, it was a work camp which
- was part of the industrial complex of the Auschwitz camp.
- See Auschwitz, is three camps Birkenau, Auschwitz, and Buna.
- So I was in Buna.
- There in Buna, they put us into a zelt
- because they didn't have housing.
- So they pitched a tent, a zelt. They put us into that zelt.
- And they asked me, what was my trade, if I have a trade.
- So I said yes, I'm a Schlosser which is I am a locksmith.
- So they put me into the Schlosser Kommando,
- a locksmith.
- I was in Kommando 90, the Schlosser Kommando.
- My kapo was kapo Karl.
- We had a kommando of 400.
- My kommando was one of the largest kommandos in Buna.
- So I was in that commando.
- And from there, you eventually transferred to Buchenwald.
- Yeah.
- Well, in Auschwitz, I was in Auschwitz.
- I'll go through first to Auschwitz.
- Because I was there till January 18, 1945.
- And on January 18, 1945, the Russian armies,
- they approached Auschwitz.
- They approached Auschwitz.
- And they took us out from there.
- And we were forced marched from Auschwitz to Gleiwitz.
- And from Gleiwitz, they put us on trains to Buchenwald.
- We went out there maybe from Auschwitz that night,
- I don't know maybe about, 18,000.
- We arrived to Buchenwald maybe 2,200, 2,500.
- Most of them died on the road.
- It was one of the most horrible transports there is, because we
- were going in the snow.
- From Auschwitz to Gleiwitz, and our shoes
- were made out of wood.
- And when you go with wooden shoes in the snow,
- the snow sticks to the sole.
- It was heavy.
- It was very heavy to go.
- And as soon as you fell down, the soldiers in the back,
- they shoot you.
- Because if you weren't able to walk, they shoot you.
- And this is how it was a miserable thing until--
- then they put us on railroad, open railroad flats
- in Gleiwitz.
- And we left, as I said Auschwitz, January 18.
- By February 2, we arrived to Buchenwald.
- And it was a very--
- the transport was a horrible transport.
- Very few people arrived to Buchenwald.
- And by the time we got to Buchenwald,
- we couldn't even walk anymore.
- We were supporting each other.
- And it was only a question.
- By the way, let me say this to you.
- It was question of giving up, if I wanted to give up,
- I had a good friend of mine, Sam.
- And he kept on asking me.
- Jack, how long do you want to live?
- I said, let's live until tomorrow morning.
- And if you gave up, you were dead.
- The only thing that kept you going is the hope that some--
- hope.
- In better time, whenever you saw death,
- you always wanted to live longer.
- Yeah.
- We don't have too much time left, unfortunately.
- So I'd like to ask you.
- You were eventually liberated by the American troops.
- Yeah.
- Sometime in April.
- April 11, April 11, 1945.
- 3 o'clock in the afternoon the first American troops
- entered Buchenwald.
- And eventually, you came to America,
- and became a very successful businessman.
- If you say so.
- Yeah.
- That's what everybody says, I don't know.
- In the last few minutes now, do you
- have any ideas about the Holocaust in retrospect?
- I mean, when I look back?
- Yes.
- Let me say this to you.
- Today, I viewed the Holocaust from a father's grandfather's
- view.
- In those things which were important to me
- at one time, in that it happened to me, it's not important to me
- today.
- And those that weren't important those days,
- became very important.
- I'll give you an example.
- When I was taken out from the ghetto
- and they were pushing us out in that transport,
- and they were hurrying us up, and there was a soldier,
- a Hungarian soldier, he hit.
- He beat us with sticks.
- And he hit me so hard in my shoulder blade
- that I lost my breath.
- And my mother behind me, she pushed me out.
- And I never forget when I look back and I saw her eyes.
- And I saw the pain in her eyes.
- That she couldn't do nothing about it.
- And this bothers me to this day.
- Of course, also when I saw my first granddaughter being born
- and I looked at her, the Holocaust came back to me.
- Because I said to myself, I hope that her life is going
- to be she wouldn't suffer.
- So in other words, today things come back.
- You look at it from a different prospectus,
- and you're more protected.
- Because you know.
- Sure.
- We live in a different world.
- Well Jack, I want to thank you very much for coming and giving
- us this interview.
- It will be, I'm sure, a very valuable contribution
- to history.
- And let's hope that the world will
- learn from your lesson and our collective lesson.
- Well, I would like to thank you, professor, for inviting me.
- And I would like to thank the City College, and whatever.
- I hope of course, that there is so much more to the story,
- but sometimes, maybe there is a time limit for everything.
- Maybe we'll have a sequel sometime.
- Yeah, maybe.
- OK, thank you very much.
- Thank you.
- Bye-bye.
Overview
- Interviewee
- Jack Rosenthal
- Date
-
interview:
1991 April 10
Physical Details
- Language
- English
- Extent
-
1 videocassette (U-Matic) : sound, color ; 3/4 in..
Rights & Restrictions
- Conditions on Access
- There are no known restrictions on access to this material.
- Conditions on Use
- No restrictions on use
Keywords & Subjects
- Topical Term
- Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)--Personal narratives.
- Personal Name
- Rosenthal, Jack.
Administrative Notes
- Legal Status
- Permanent Collection
- Provenance
- Dr. Randolph Braham donated the oral history interview with Jack Rosenthal to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in June 1991.
- Special Collection
-
The Jeff and Toby Herr Oral History Archive
- Record last modified:
- 2023-11-16 08:09:15
- This page:
- https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn520438
Additional Resources
Download & Licensing
- Request Copy
- See Rights and Restrictions
- Terms of Use
- This record is digitized but cannot be downloaded online.
In-Person Research
- Available for Research
- Plan a Research Visit