Larry Brenner - December 13, 1981
Incident in Fertorákos 1
Another incident happened which was real shocking to me. It was, I believe a Christmas Eve, December. Yeah, it was definitely Christmas Eve and we were in our quarters late, around eight o'clock. Our quarters existed I would say about, a stall as I told you, space-wise was about twenty wide maybe or twenty-five deep, and we were sleeping stretched out two rows or from one end to another and the center was a little aisle way. And uh, we were sleeping on hay or straw rather. Now, then all of a sudden, we hear some noise right in the front of our quarters. Halt, and yelling and shooting. And then finally we, we know that, this... As I mentioned that before that there were German, or rather Hungarian Volk... uh, Germans living in town and they were quite rough to us. They, they tried to prove to the Germans they are better Jew haters than they were. He got a hold of one Jewish boy who just milling around, probably tried to go from one... Remember we had about maybe in that town maybe about a thousand Jews which were, which were quartered out to different peasants' homes all over the town. And we were milling around from one... between one place to another, something, we went visiting one to another. And this fellow, he has drunk and he yelled at that man hard. I don't know if he did stop or not, but nevertheless he put him against the wall, you know, right in front of, right in front of us and shot him dead. And then these two Hungarian Germans came into our quarters and they were, was asking for volunteers to bury that fellow. Naturally, everybody was scared that when you dig a grave for him then maybe, you don't know what may happen. Luckily it wasn't me who the, who went. Some other fellow went there and they took this boy down and digged the grave for him and buried him. The same two fellows who shot this Jewish boy, it happened--I'm skipping time, I'll come back--a pouring evening, it was, I think it came around in early March and we, it was routine, we ran out every morning to work. We had meager food. Came home at night and we tried to clean ourselves. But this time I think we were full of lice, because uh, there wasn't any really cleaning facilities. Only cleaning facilities was that we had something to water. Wash ourself, but showers as such there wasn't, and, you know, so, you know, so uh, underwear or any. We, we maybe wear for a month, so it wasn't cleanliness. And we were... As I told you, pouring evening uh, we were in our quarters, to pass time or to keep our sanity still alive and not always thinking of the misery what we have, one of our, one of the fellow started to read the history of Megillah of, uh...
Purim.
...the story of, the Purim story. And somehow these two Nazis, these Hungarian Nazis, they spoke Hungarian but not good enough, their main language was German, but they lived in the Hungarian Austrian border under Hungary. They still understood Hungarian, but not clearly. And then the story of uh, of King Ahasuerus... There's lots of king, king mentioned. And this fellow thought perhaps there's a king, who's the king, king of England, some kind of a conspiracy goes on, that was in mind.
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