Eva Ackermann - December 6, 1982
Being Forced to Leave Budapest
We were there the whole day waiting to be categorized into groups, of what I don't, I don't know what uh, kind of groups. They uh, quartered us into--and uh, started to rain uh, toward the evening and it was dark and uh, I really don't remember if we slept on that stadium, but from then on until uh, until I got out to Austria--until I walked out and the way we walked out was like every day uh, I don't know how many miles--fifteen kilometers I think, we walked a day. Uh, we were around Budapest. We circled around, walking every day and then always uh, resting up on a stadium at night and I don't remember of any hygiene uh, I have it marked down, I really have made some notes about uh, going to the bathroom in the street and I don't remember really uh, washing up or uh, uh. How, how I, how we survived. It was two weeks--it was about two weeks time that we uh, circled around Budapest and smaller towns, Gödöllo--not familiar with any--we're talking like uh, Mt. Clemens, maybe around here. An older outskirts of uh, not as far as Lansing, but just around here. And went from one place to another. Why, I don't know. And then we came back to uh, to Budapest and everybody sort of felt that now we are going to go home, but what they did was, they put us on a--what was that--uh...
You were put on a barge.
We were put on a barge. And, at that point, I don't know how many of us, a few hundred of us. There were thousands when we uh, first congregated on that stadium on October twenty-third, but then uh, we went to different uh, I don't know, different parts of uh, uh, around Budapest I suppose.
Were the Ger...were the Germans the ones who...
No, that was, that was just Hungarians. That's why I say, they were, they were so rotten that it was just almost unbelievable uh, uh, That, that night I guess, first I, I found out what a, anti-Semites are, uh...
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