Holocaust Survivor: David Leitner

Born 1930 in Nyiregyhaza, Hungary. Father conscripted into labor units, 1940, 1941, 1942. Attitudes of local populace and Slovak neighbors. Ghetto and Nyirjes camp. To Auschwitz, end of May or early June. Gypsy camp in Birkenau. Children to Camp E after Gypsy camp liquidated. In Scheisskommando (latrine squad) till Sonderkommando revolt, October 7, 1944. Mengele removes 51 children, including David, from crematorium number 5. Unloading potatoes. March to Althammer. Mauthausen camp. March to Gunskirchen; conditions there. Return to Hungary. To Eretz Yisrael, 1949.

How they were ransomed

In Birkenau the barracks were in the charge of Blockaelteste (block chiefs). They were generally non-Jewish Poles, with assistants. Every one of them had a boy or two of whom he was very fond to serve him and perhaps for other purposes about which we had no inkling then. They didn't want "their" boys to be selected for the gas chambers, so each one saw to ransoming "his" boy. How did they ransom them? They would go into the barracks and indiscriminately pick children to be sent to the gas chamber instead of "their" boys.

Once, on the day before the Simhat Torah holiday, some block chiefs came to snatch children. Not many were left, as most of them had been sent off in the first two selections. I was one of those seized for dispatch to the crematorium. It was impossible to escape, since they had locked us in a sealed barrack. Those including me slated for extermination in the third selection, scheduled for Simhat Torah, were herded into blocks 11 and 13.

Several hundred of us all children marched out of block 11 toward the crematorium. It was midday. I don't remember whether SS men escorted us. Oh, yes there was an SS man, an awful Ukrainian by the name of Bartsky. They hadn't come out of block 13  yet. The selection was going on in there. The stronger ones were sent back inside and the rest marched to the crematorium, behind us. We walked.

They took us inside and ordered us to strip naked. Of course, we knew what they intended to do with us. We stood there naked. An order came and we were told to wait. It seems that more fit children were needed, and there was an order to select 50 of us. I was among the 50 children they took. There must have been about a thousand children inside the crematorium building. All of us were Jews from Hungary and Transvylvania and possibly also Czechoslovakia, from the areas that had been annexed to Hungary. There were 50 of us, and another one managed to join us. He had been with me in the Scheisskommando, the labor platoon that cleaned the latrines and sometimes also served the underground by delivering materials and information from camp to camp. He was short but healthy. I don't know how he got to be Number 51.

When the selection was over we were stood to the side. We stood there  naked, wondering what they were going to with to us. We thought they might be taking us to bring wood to the crematorium, or to turn us into soap. They drove us naked outside and shoved the others inside, into the crematorium. They used their truncheons on us. Then the SS men and the kapo brought us clothing to put on and walked us back to the camp. I think that that Simhat Torah, the Day of the Rejoicing Over the Torah, we all rejoiced, even the antisemitic Polish Gentiles, for that was the first time that anyone had ever come back from the crematorium alive.

Of course, afterwards we kept looking for the children in whose place we had been taken to the crematorium. I remember one block chief's telling me and another child, I think not maliciously: "You see? When God wants it, you're saved." I saw this as a kind of apology; maybe there was a bit of humanity in that Blockaeltester.

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