Marton Adler - July 13, 1989
Transport to Auschwitz
How long were you in the boxcar?
Pardon?
How long were you in the boxcar?
I'd say three days. Three days. Three days and then the finally you and the boxcar came to Auschwitz, again they put them on a siding, because they had trains ahead of us. And finally when our train, but when there was an a siding already, we seen groups of people in these striped uniforms and you didn't know whether they were humans or non-humans, but obviously they were, this or ???, the car was still locked, then finally when the train [pause] started to moving, now it's our turn to be unloaded, to be disembarked from these boxcars. I mean all of this I know now, both from memory and from reading, most of it from memory. They opened these cars and again, each, each time got worse and worse, in other words, as bad as it was when they took us to the synagogue or to the city hall, and then the trucks to the ghetto, then that thing to the train, this thing was, when I say this thing, when finally opened up these doors, that was the most chaotic thing that I could ever--"Schnell! Raus, raus! Schnell, schnell!" People--they schlepped people off the train and but all they hollered was, "Men separate, men..." No, "Able- bodied men separate and women and children separate. Raus! Schnell, schnell! Raus." And we seen guys and the guys that, that processed us, those were really inmates which now I know who they were, the Sonderkommando and all that. And the last thing that I heard, as a matter of fact, the only words that I remember my mother saying to my dad from even the time when we left from Sokirnitsa to these trains, all I remember is this, I don't even know where she was, my mother all this time, it was dark in that damn train. And, but when they opened the train, we thought oh boy, now we say daylight, ah, did you have a nice trip? Now it's all chaos, "Raus, schnell, raus, schnell..." So I just remember my mother said to my father, "Die geh mit Mialech," You're gonna go with Marton. Or "let Marton go with you and I'll go with ??? and the Kinder." And that's it. I didn't see her, I didn't see them get off the train, my brother Yossel and my sister Rifka. I didn't see her. All I know is later on the next day, or two days later when I was already processed, or even the same day when we were going to be processed, I seen women marching you know without hair, I kept looking, maybe one of them is my mother. But I didn't see, I didn't see my mother even at a time that we got on, I didn't see her, because they pushed us, they pushed us in like garbage. Like, like, like refuse. Worse than garbage.
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