Holocaust Survivor: Hanna Deutsch (nee Frenkel)

Born 1930 in Vasarosnameny, Hungary. Parents' home. Schoolday memories. Expulsion of families lacking Hungarian citizenship. Collecting money to bribe authorities in Budapest. Family's economic situation after father declared missing. April 1944: Jews concentrated in Beregszasz ghetto. Deportation to Auschwitz. "Selections" and living conditions in Auschwitz. Hanna and sister deported to Germany. Markleeberg camp. Work in factory making airplane spare parts till evacuation in spring 1945. Work on German peasant's farm before and after liberation. Russian soldiers. Return to Budapest via Prague, and return to Vasarosnameny. Loss of belongings that had been hidden. Year in Vac. At camp for young girls of Bnai Akiva religious Zionist youth movement. Difficulties in getting out of Communist Hungary. Smuggling Jews out of country. Failed attempt to steal across Slovakian border. Arrest. Another effort to leave Hungary, 1949. Arrival in Israel in 1949 after stay in Austria and Italy. Attitude to Holocaust. Attitude to visits in Germany and Hungary.

A "good" camp

Compared to the other camps, the Markleeberg camp near Leipzig was a good one. It was a small camp for women, mainly from Hungary, and in my estimation there were no more than 4,000 women there; some say even less.

We worked in a factory making spare parts for airplanes. We that is: I, my sister, my cousin and about 20 other girls were lucky. We only had to do a 12-hour day shift, while the others had to alternate between day and night shifts. Our setup had a big advantage. The others were jealous of us. We were given lunch in the factory consisting of a loaf of bread, margarine and victuals. People didn't grab. Everything was done in orderly fashion.

On Sundays we didn't work; we just did our laundry and washed up. My foreman was a German Socialist and he always brought us the latest news about the war. His secretary was a very fat woman. She wore a swastika on her chest, and she had a son serving in the SS, yet she was very good to me. Every morning, when I rinsed her coffee cup, I knew she had saved a thin slice of bread for me. She gave me an extra undergarment so I should be warm. And the foreman always gave me a smile.

The guarding of the camp was done mainly by SS women, and the camp commander was also decent to us. I and my sister took care how we looked: we wanted to look as pretty as possible. We painted the wooden shoes we had been issued in the camp dark-gray. The foreman saw what we had done but didn't say a word. He seemed to like it. Usually people were tried and punished for such things. There were all kinds of punishments. The work was checked, and it was forbidden to work without wearing a frock over our clothing. I felt very warm and I took off the frock. I was punished. I had to stand beside the fence for many hours. There was another thing I was afraid of. I was wearing an extra undergarment, the one I had been given by the German woman. That was also something for which they punished people. I was ready to stand there wearing just one garment, but my sister took my frock and stood there instead of me.

There was still another punishment, an ugly one. Belgian, Russian and Dutch prisoners-of-war worked in the factory. They were the foremen. They trained the girls, and no conversation was allowed except about the work. Some girls were caught conversing. Our hair had begun to grow. The girls who were caught had a strip shaved up the middle of their skull. It was an awful sight, awful. They stood out so.

Afterwards we were told that one of the Belgian young men fell in love with one of the girls. They got married later. Yes, love also flourished there. This camp can't be compared to other camps. One day we were told that a baby had been born at the hospital. The camp commander offered to be the baby's godfather. We told ourselves that if that was the case, then we were not badly off. But it seems that the authorities had other ideas. We heard that the mother and baby were taken away. We don't know where they were taken.

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