David Kahan - April 29, 1982
German Invasion
Um, let's, let's move to 1944 then. When um...in March 1944, is that the first time that you saw German soldiers?
That was, that was the first time. In our town permanently I used to see lots of trains of German soldiers going through our town to the Russian front all the time, ever since even--ever since 1941, I have seen a lot of uh, German troop trains. But the first Germans who actually stayed in our town uh, I saw them after, after the, after the Germans have taken over Hungary.
What happened after March 1944?
After the Germans uh, have taken over Budapest and a few Germans uh, came to our town and unfortunately, I mentioned before that we had no physical harm to us as I can recall, but we did have Quislings. I remember a few Germans, immediately they were called Volksdeutsche, Hungarians of German descent who were keeping low until then, but then all of a sudden uh, they got to be the run, they, they are running the town. And um, and immediately the Jews were uh, uh, then we were really scared. We knew that something bad is going to happen. Um, they, they made, one thing that I recall immediately, that for some reason or other they were, they were asking some Jews to leave the downtown area in the, the shochet in our town, who lived right around the Synagogue downtown uh, he moved into our house. We shared our home with him. Um, he had to vacate uh, his premises. uh, the, the Synagogue was downtown. And I think that other Jews had to leave the downtown perimeter and they moved to different areas. Uh, that, that's how it started. Uh, we knew that things were, then we were scared and we could see trouble uh, coming uh, but we still had Pesach at home.
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