Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

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Bert Dan - November 17, 1982

A track?

...the tracks. And they needed people over there and this hundred from the other hundred from our group were sent down there to build those tracks. And they had a very difficult, rough time because after I would say about six or seven months later we were together again because they sent us to a place, it is called Szentkiralyszabadja. And there was a tremendous huge place that they're building an airport, an army airport. And they had there--I'm not exaggerating if I would say a hundred thousand Jewish people--mainly Jewish. I think they had probably about five hundred or so non-Jews that were also brought there, but, but the majority close to a hundred thousand Jews were brought in there and we worked on that--building the airport and...

What was this--name of the place again?

Szent...it is a long--if you want me to write it down for you.

Yeah, write it up here for me. That was in Hungary or was it part of Romania that was taken?

That was in Hu...that was--originally it was Hungary.

Okay.

Can I write it here?

Sure.

And we all worked there on, on that uh, on the airport and we were fed very, very poorly over there. But uh, we had our freedom in the camp. We could walk around from one camp to the other and--it wasn't as bad as we thought it would be. It wasn't that bad. This was already at the end of 194...'43. And all of a sudden, they decided that they are going to release everybody for two months. You can go home. Just, without any uh, hesitation they just told us that we can, we are free and we can go home and we have to report back on the 15th of February 1944. And we went home and when we came back in 1944 it was already entirely a different story altogether. At that time they started preparing already, sending out, the whole camp was going to be dissolved and sent people to, to Russia--to the front, you know...

Mm-hm.

...where the war was going on and to Galicia, which was part of Poland at the time. And uh, we happened to be, our group was many thousands of others, we were sent to Galicia.