Emerich Grinbaum - October 3, 2000 & January 8, 2001
Deportation
So they got fascists to do it.
Some, from other areas uh, they brought some other police because they were afraid that these police, they were, they're not going to do a good job as to the cruelty--the government. So they had some new faces in the police. This small city, we, we knew practically everybody.
Was there any talking going on when--now it's getting fairly serious, violent, serious. Was there any talking among your family about what was happening or where you thought you might be going?
Bef...in the ghetto or in the brick factory?
When they, when they--in the brick factory, when they took you.
Brick factory you know, we were afraid uh, you know. The, the second or third, already they organized transports. You know, there was four or five transports from the...
Train transports.
Train transports, okay. And they told us they're taking us to Hungary to work. You know, because most the men and their--these are the in front, in the, in the army. So they need workers in the, in the agriculture. That was uh, summer almost, they need a lot of work. And we didn't want uh, we wanted to believe. We wanted to believe that we--they are not taking us to Poland or to Germany.
Like your father, you wanted to believe.
Oh, for my father believed. He wanted everything to be...most, a lot of people didn't believe, but what could we do?
At what point do you--did you realize that this was not...
When we passed--we didn't go to Hungary and we passed Košice and Slovakia and through the Slovakia and then we arrived--I remember we, we, we were in Polish cities we saw that, so we knew that they're taking us somewhere in Poland. But we didn't have much knowledge about Auschwitz. You know what, I--we never hear the word Auschwitz. I don't know why. I was listening--we were listening to the, to the western radios and they didn't mention Auschwitz, I don't know. Now, they mentioned a lot of other things, but no Auschwitz.
Yeah.
And--so when we arrived, we saw that they stripped us all and then they opened the door and we already saw that, that--we didn't know that uh, we saw that the people are, in the camp they're working, you know. So we, we still thought that okay we arrived to work somewhere, you know. We didn't know that was Auschwitz. Into the--did you put? Okay, no...
You spent three days--four days in the brick factory?
Approximately.
Okay. And then...
They put on us in the, in the uh, cars and...
The police came.
They were always there. The gendarmes and police. They put us in the cars.
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