Holocaust Survivor: Hayim Taub

Born 1929 in Nyiregyhaza, Hungary. Jews' attitude to Hungary and Zionism. Transfer to ghetto, spring 1944. Two weeks at Harangos farm. Auschwitz. Labor camp at Dyhernfurth. Father rescues him. Funfteichen camp. Wustegiersdorf camp. Dornau camp. Germans present him to Red Cross delegation as model, January 1945. Schotenburg camp. Liberated by Russians, May 1945. Return to Hungary. Inner struggle over faith. Bnai Akiva training camp. To Israel, 1948.

"Rescued from the 'rest home'

We arrived at Dyhernfurth from Auschwitz. They assigned us to special work in a plant producing all sorts of things. I was assigned to the soldering section. There was a huge metals workshop where pipes had to be cleaned with sand. I and a friend were given this job. With great difficulty, and wearing a mask, I crawled in to clean those six-meter-long pipes. We went in, and did not come out till we had finished.

I felt that if I went on working there another week or two, I would collapse. I remember telling the Ukrainian kapo that I would not go on, no matter what. He called the SS man. I said I couldn't go on working that way: they should either reduce my hours or assign me to another job. I remember opening my shirt and saying, in Yiddish: "You can kill me if you want." I thought the SS man understood me, but he asked the Ukrainian: "What'd he say?" The Ukrainian answered in German: "You can kill him." The SS man was a young fellow, and I couldn't have picked him out in a crowd of a hundred people. But I remember him saying: "Get back to work." Of course, the kapo hit me, and I went on working there.

I had another solution: I deliberately stepped on a rusty nail and got my foot infected. There was a hospital in the camp, and I thought they would put me there, and then, after a while, assign me to another job. My foot really swelled up and I was hospitalized.

There they were drawing up a list of people who wanted to go to a rest home, at Gross-Rosen. I didn't know exactly what Gross-Rosen was, so I signed up. From my hospital window I called down to my father, of blessed memory, that I had signed up for Gross-Rosen. He shouted: "What have you done?! Why did you do that?!" All I know is that when the group left for Gross-Rosen, I wasn't in it. Later, when I left the hospital, I learned that Papa and my uncle had got me off the list. I don't know how; maybe they bribed the doctors or the people who drew up the list. As far as I know, people who went to the Gross-Rosen "rest home" haven't returned to this day. Us they had told: a week's rest at the home, to get better so as to be able to go back to work. How was it supposed to occur to me that it wasn't a rest home? That it was the notorious crematorium?

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