Paul Molnar - July 24, 2002
Fate of Family
When did you find out for sure what had happened to your family?
Oh I found out uh, when I was in Buchenwald. I mean, I.
Later you realized.
Oh yes, very shortly after that.
You were all alone? You weren't alone in Auschwitz.
No, I had my uncle and uh, I had my uncle and cousin with me.
And your father had gone.
My father was in Hungary, he was in the Hungarian Army.
In the labor force. So your mother and.
My mother and grandmother and uh, little brother were gassed that day. And they were a number of other people from Rákospalota that I knew, you know, who were, we were together, I mean. There probably were you know, a few hundred with me that I knew or more, I mean, there were a lot of people I knew.
Yeah.
We were all Hungarian Jews and we were all from the suburb of Budapest and there were a lot of us you know, we arrived in the five thousand, we arrived on the same day. And I don't know the numbers, how many uh, were selected to live, or how many were selected not to, but if you were able-bodied-I should back-track that the one thing did happen to me was, I was fourteen years old and when I got off uh, this train and I went to the place where they're going to give us our bath, one of the uh, prisoners said to me, "How old are you?" I said, "I'm fourteen." He says, "You're not fourteen, you're sixteen." Now nobody asked me in Auschwitz-in Birkenau, nobody asked my age, because as I said, I wasn't even registered. So, but he told me that I'm sixteen. So I have records from Buchenwald, from the uh, Red Cross where I was registered and I, I looked at these things. I don't even know where it is, years ago I got this thing uh, and it says date of birth uh, December 29, 1927. And that's when I remembered again, that's because what I told 'em, I lied. I was born '29 but he told me you're sixteen so I just added two years.
Do you think.
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