Holocaust Survivor: Shmuel Roth

Born 1919 in Sziget, Transylvania. Conscripted into labour unit, 1941. With unit in Munkacs. Relations between Jews of Budapest and rural Jews, and with Hungarian command. Hungarian officer's antisemitism and his removal after contact between commanding officer and Budapest Jewish Community Council. Witnesses liquidation of Polish Jews at Drohobycz. Hungarian Jews' reaction to his report. Jewish woman murdered by Germans buried at commanding officer's initiative. Efforts to avoid being sent to Ukrainian front. Events in Drohobycz, April 1943: hundreds of labor-unit members die in arson attempt. Service as cook in unit of Hungarian and German officers. Gets out of march toward Austria. Famine in Budapest ghetto during fighting of January 1945. To Israel via Cyprus detention, 1949.

The officer who sided with us

There were various kinds of Hungarian officers. Some were sadists, whose cruelty is indescribable. Fortunately, our commanding officer was a refined person. I had a cousin in Munkacs. One evening I went to visit her, and came back at 12 midnight. This officer had come to make a checkup and saw me arriving. He asked me where I had been. I didn't have a pass, and it was forbidden to leave the camp without a pass. I said to him: "My cousin lives here in Munkacs, and I heard she's sick, so I went to see her." He said: "You're lucky: if the rest of them weren't asleep, I'd have given you a couple of slaps that would have made you remember me the rest of your life." He let me off without anything. Why am I telling all this? To show his attitude. It may be said that he treated us like a father. And since the commander was a good, brave man, the other members of the command staff couldn't just do as they pleased.

I was the unit's chief cook, and he I don't know why liked me a lot. After we had seen the murder of Polish Jews by the Germans in Drohobycz, one of the sergeants called us all out to the assembly area. The commander arrived, and showed us a girl's hand, which a dog had found and brought over. The hand was still fresh. You could tell by the fingrnails that it was a girl's hand. He said: "Look, today is Sunday. For me this is a religious holy day, but we're allowed to work; not like with you people. We have to find the place from which this hand was taken.

If anybody wants to go look I'm ready to go along with you." We agreed, of course. We broke up into small groups and went searching. Finally we found a communications trench about 50 meters long, one of many trenches in the area, and that is where we found the bodies. It was the hand of one of the girls the Germans had murdered there three or four days earlier.

The corpses were covered by two or three centimeters of earth, and we worked till long after dark to bury them one meter deep. He wanted us to mark the place with a cross, but we decided not to do so. All we did was put a marker saying that "people" were buried there. I came home and reported that Jews were being executed. They simply refused to believe me. They reacted coldly, as though to say: "It won't happen to me! That's not going to happen to me!"

Another story: Shortly before the Russians routed the Hungarians and Germans in December 1942, we were ordered to go to the Ukraine via the Czech border. We arrived at Gilanta. Our officer knew what going to the front would mean for us. There were some Jewish doctors in our unit, and we decided on the following stratagem: We would cause our unit to seem to have a typhus epidemic, so we would be quarantined. How? Five of us including me drank coffee with a lot of salt, which caused us all to have fever. And five men coming down with a fever is cause to suspect typhus. When the mayor of Gilanta refused to let us enter the city, the commander said to him: "Give me a note signed by you allowing me to proceed and cause the infection of thousands of Hungarian and German soldiers." The mayor refused to sign, so we were in quarantine in Gilanta for a month and a half. Our fevers disappeared after a day. But orders are orders: people with typhus have to be in quarantine, and, just to make sure, for a month and a half.

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