Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

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Emerich Grinbaum - October 3, 2000 & January 8, 2001

You got to Prague, to Budapest.

Uh, uh, Pilsen, Prague, Bratislava, Budapest and home. Interesting. On--we were traveling through a other Hungarian city between Budapest and Munkacs. It's called Debrecen. This is the second largest--at that time, it was third largest city. There was approximately 200,000 people. There used to be a large Jewish community in, in Debrecen. And relatively religious, relatively. That, that area was the east, that East Europe, East Hungary. And we were looking through the train, train and I'm seeing Jewish children with payes. A lot you know, we stared, they walking, we went out for awhile. So later on I realized if you read, you know probably the whole story. Two ghettos, Debrecen and Szeged, they did not take them to Auschwitz. They took them to Austria. And they--the whole family lived together. I don't know what happened, there are many speculations. Uh, Brahm book.

Yeah.

If you read there is more detail. And they survived. Practically everybody survived. There was 20--30,000 Jews from these two, two ghettos and they came back, children. I don't know. Either, either Eichmann was on vacation or something. That, that particular time, I don't know. The family said the--most, most of them survived.

Most of them survived. And so you saw these--what, what did you think when you saw these religious Jews?

I don't know, I don't know, I don't know how they, they were religious people with children with payes you know, and, and--with the, with the hat you know, we saw that they are Jews you know, even with--without payes we saw that.