Some of the grandparents gave up the ghost so that they would not be extra mouths to feed, a burden for the rest of the family, which had to survive. The life of an entire generation perished beneath the eyes of the grandchildren. The trauma was to mark all the survivors, perhaps more so even than their own suffering.
Remembering how the Romanians treated her on the day of the deportation, Miriam, who is now ninety-two, has never been able to go back to Campulung. She tried once, but was unable to get out of the car.
Before she was deported, the young man who was courting Mimi gave her a notebook, which she turned into a diary of her hellish ordeal in Djurin. The young man also survived, but not long after returning to Romania he lost his mind.
Not even seventy years after that inhuman experience can the specialist in paediatric oncology sleep without taking sleeping pills or let go of her tears when she remembers her ordeal.
But it was in Oradea that I met the most numerous community of survivors. Before the Second World War more than thirty thousand Jews lived in Oradea. Doctors and architects, businessmen and actors, the Jews made a major contribution to the town’s development and prosperity.
The Horthy persecution in Hungarian-occupied Transylvania resulted in the death of more than 135,000 Jews. As I have said, the planning and implementation of the Holocaust in northern Transylvania, as well as in Moldavia, Bessarabia, Bukovina, Dorohoi and Trans-Dniester, made Romania second only to Nazi Germany in the number of Jews massacred.
Of the around 132,000 Jews deported from Hungarian-occupied northern Transylvania to Auschwitz in the period from May to June 1944, only a handful survived.
They include Gabriela Bone, Margit Mezei, Vioara Braun, Clarissa Popescu, Lazar Freund, Ladislau Stauer, Elisabeta Steier, and Olga Gavor. They are among the heroes who survived the Auschwitz and Mauthausen death camps and the ghettos of Trans-Dniester, and I had the honour of meeting them in Oradea.
Their harrowing stories, which have lost none of their power to shock even so many decades later, all have a common denominator: the ghetto, the day of deportation, and the train journey to an unknown destination and tragic fate. On the platform at Auschwitz, all the young people bid their grandparents, parents and younger siblings farewell. But only the luckiest of those who got off the train still have a story to tell.
“First of all, we were separated from our father. They separated the men straightaway. After that we were separated from our mother, who was forty-two; she could go to work, but we had our two younger brothers, aged five and ten. The women with children they straightaway sent to the left. We didn’t know what that meant at the time, but they were taken to the showers, which released gas instead of water.”
“There was no food, there were no plates, no spoons. There was food in five-litre pots, the kind of thing we wouldn’t even had fed to the pigs at home. We each got three to five mouthfuls and we had to pass them from mouth to mouth until it finished. And we would be looking to see whether anybody got more mouthfuls than he should.”
“They made selections. Dr Mengele came and made the selections. Dr Mengele came and you had to walk past him in a line, naked, with your arms raised. But you never knew whether it was for work of for the crematorium. And I was a girl of seventeen, although from the start, when our parents were taken to the gas chambers, us they took to the showers and gave us Rif soap, which was made from Jews. After that, of course, we were naked. There were German soldiers who cut our hair, even on our private parts.
I will never forget, even if I live to a hundred, the moment when I walked in front of him with my arms raised, completely naked, and he asked me how old I was. I said eighteen, but I wasn’t yet eighteen. I stood there for a few moments. And he stood thinking for a little and then made a gesture with his wrist. That was life for me,”remembers Vioara ‘Ibby’ Braun, a woman of eighty-eight, born in 1926 in the town of Marghita, Bihor county.
But the story of Lazar Freund exceeds all imagination. The ninety-four-year-old survivor recounts how with a friend from Oradea he managed to escape from Auschwitz, where the Germans made him work in the mines. Shortly after his escape he fell into the hands of the Russians. Although initially they promised to help him return home, after long and exhausting interrogations the Russians subjected him to forced labour. It was not long before Lazar managed to escape for the second time, this time from the Russians.
“Even if everybody else dies, I will survive to tell the tale,” recounts Gabriela Bone (88), born in Targu Mures in 1927. Her family owned a mirror factory in the town. She made her promise to survive aged sixteen in the concentration camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau. As an aside, the Bone family lived on Octavian Goga Street, named after the Romanian poet and politician whom Nazi Germany funded in order to foment anti-Semitism in Romania.
“Whatever might be, if you have the will, you will succeed. That is what I have learned from my experience,” Gabriela Bone.