Larry Brenner - December 13, 1981
Forced Labor Camp 2
Anyway, now going back to me, when I was, when, I'm going back, as I said we were rolled back with a train to Budapest and our function was... They put us in a, in a school as, as a group as such. And this was in Pest itself, and we was given a yellow band and a Hungarian army hat only, a cap. Only a cap, that was our... Now what... Also remember that the... Under the Jewish law there's people who are born Gentile, but their father or grandfather or great-grandfather was Jewish, they were also considered as Jews by the, by Hitler law. Why I'm saying this is that because there were lots of boys in my group, they were not born Jewish. The first time they found out they were Jews and they were under the same situation as I was. The only difference what it was, we were wearing yellow band and they were wearing white band. So, we had about, maybe about hundred and fifty in our group and half and half. Seventy-five per... seventy-five with yellow band and seventy-five with white band. We were divided with four, in four groups. In each group maybe thirty or so and so. And each one had a leader. Now the... And the head of our group was naturally a Hungarian officer as a captain. Uh, we had about two or three Gentile officers on our group... It was a sergeant and a--as I told you--a, a lieutenant and I think a captain and a, and maybe a, a, a, just a plain soldier. And they were the administrators and they were the one who protect, supposedly protected us. And uh, daily function was given to Jewish Kapos, so to speak. They weren't Kapos, but Jewish leaders. Our function--it was in Budapest--two-folds. One, the main one was when uh, that time war already was quite uh, in progress and the uh, English and American airforce quite regularly bombed Budapest. And our function was, the main function to go right after the bombing and try to uh, try to, uh--how you call it?--to get as many people out from the...
Rubble.
...rubble as we can and also after the bombing to get the, the rubble away, cleared away as fast we can. And when things were not busy, our other function was to go to the Hungarian railroad and to get... They, they had their headquarters where they distributed all their food to the Front. They send it to the Front like beans, sugar and what we... Our, our duty was to load up the railroad to get it for the, you know, Front, because we stole some food from them.
© Board of Regents University of Michigan-Dearborn