Bert Dan - November 17, 1982
Being Drafted for Labor Camps
It's almost a year from the day they first came.
I went ten years and one--one year and ten days exactly I was locked up. And they released me without any hesitation and I was a free man again and by the time I got home one day later because I gave 'em a ticket, you know, to take the train home. I got home the 20th of November and at that point there were uh, how do you call those uh, I don't know what the heck they're called--anyway they put up signs all over the city that every Jewish man who was born 1912 to 1919 has to go in and to the--to a labor camp. But uh, they gave you exactly the place where you have to report. And the date came up every--like I was born in 1916, so I had to report on the 15th of December of 1942, which was about uh, less than a month after my release.
Only Jewish males?
Only Jewish males. Only Jewish males. And I went in, in '19...in December the 15th of 1942 to a Nagybánya it's called--a Hungarian--in Hungarian it is called Nagybánya, before it was called Baia Mare which was part of Romania and then changed it back to--you know, that was part of Transylvania.
Was that a city or a...
A city, it was a city.
Could you spell it? Either one, it doesn't matter.
Yeah, it is uh, in Hungarian it is called Nagybánya. It is N-a-g-y and then another word, Banya, B-a-n-y-a.
Oh.
Nagybánya. And they kept us there in a tremendous, big uh, school yard for forty-eight hours. And actually they didn't give us any food because everybody ??? and then we took food around, you know. And uh, while we were standing around in that yard, I had to rent in the thing because it was already interesting thing that uh, to show the, the, the, the meanness of what was going on there.
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