Bert Dan - November 17, 1982
Marching Back to Hungary
Before.
...before him. Even worse. But fortunately enough, it was already September and the Russian army started pushing in. And they had no choice, so we had to pack up and we started walking. And we walked through the mud, the mud, and mud and mud without stopping, and we kept on going. A lot of them just didn't--they couldn't go any further and they were left there. Some of them were shot, some of them were left there laying in the ditches. And they--probably some of them survived like that. And uh, whoever was able to walk, we kept on walking.
Back towards where you were from?
Back towards Hungary.
Mm-hm.
That's right. And we arrived about two days before Rosh Hashanah in 1944. We arrived into Hungary into a bigger city, it was called Besztercze.
What part of Hungary was that?
Part of, part of Transylvania. Part of Transylvania.
But from your region.
From our region, that's right. We left Romania and that's the first time actually when we did find out that there are no Jews left in Hungary because they had a tremendous big Jewish population over there and there was nobody. Absolutely nobody in that...
The name of that city was what? It doesn't matter. It was a bigger city than your city?
No, it's Hunga...no, Romanian small town called Besztercze actually. So, so anyway, we were put in there again in a big school yard and uh, and at this point the Russian army must have been coming very, very fast because they had a tremendous big German population in this town in the whole region...
Mm-hm.
...who lived there all their life. They were not from Germany but were German origins, you know, like their ancestors came from--and they spoke mostly German instead of Hungarian or Romanian.
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