Lanka Ilkow - October 12, 1991
Deportation to Auschwitz
Let me ask you, when they took you away from the brick factory, you went to the train station.
Yeah, on the--like animals...
And you saw the cattle...
cattles.
cars. What did you think when you saw the cattle car?
Well, we were scared, we were scared.
What did they tell you? Did they say where you were going?
They said that we were going to a place where we will work. So...
They didn't say Poland, did they?
Yeah, and it was very--you didn't get to eat. Everybody just took you know, what they had. That's why I was saving the food that we should have. We just had a piece of bread everyday and so. I had herring. I was lucky that I went out to work. And uh, there was a delicatessen you know, a Jewish--which was very famous in Ungvar. So I went in that delicatessen. They let me go in, the, the policeman who took us you know, to work and brought us back. So he let us. But when we come on the gate, sometime they took away the foods from us. But they didn't take away, so I had a herring, I bought it. So uh, we were saving we should have. And we had to go to a toilet.
You're in the box car now.
Yeah, in the box car they put a, a pot there and everybody was going on that pot. Then they maked a hole in the box car, so everybody went there. It was just a shame you know, Jewish people who--you know, who had it good and everything, and here you're going in front of everybody in the toilet. You know, it was, it was just a--we was embarrassed from each other, from each other. And one man he run away from the box car. He cut a hole when the box car was standing. He run away. And he's in Israel. Zwi Kalstein and he's in Israel. He went to Romania and somehow from Romania he went to Palestine.
He cut a hole in the box car and escaped from it?
Yeah, yeah, he escaped.
Did anyone else go with him?
No. Nobody was going. Everybody was afraid. "Where will I go? Like me, you know. I, I wouldn't leave my little brother, my sister. I wouldn't leave 'em.
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