Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

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Adele Sandel - [n.d.]

You are in a bigger city now.

Yes.

Are they coming back to the bigger city?

To the bigger city now.

And how--when you have a bigger city how do you find uh, how did they know that you are in this bigger city and things like that? How does everybody know where everybody else is?

Well, like...

How do you find each other?

...like, I told you, we went to these trains to wait for people.

Uh-huh.

We had a beautiful apartment. It was empty with furniture. Jews lived there before. The Hungarian Jews were only about eleven months--or, or ten or eleven months in Auschwitz. They left everything behind. They ran away--they took them away to, to Auschwitz and they left everything there.

Did the Gentiles get all their furniture and other things?

Well, how much--that was a city where, where there was about, there was about 50,000 people lived in that city. There were about 20,000 Je...Jews there.

Hmm.

It was a beautiful city.

What's the name of the city?

Košice, Kaschau, Kaschau. So, how much could they take, I mean, and they--some of them were decent people, too. Somehow, this apartment was beautiful. It's furnished with beds, with linen, even clothing. The people never came back so we just went in and, and, and we, we would just clean. We cleaned it up because Germans were there. Germans, Germans lived there. They took it away. And, we cleaned up and we started housekeeping.

And how did you get it from the Germans?

The Germans weren't there anymore.

They left.

If the Germans--the war was over. The Germans weren't there anymore. It was over. Hitler wasn't alive any more. Um, the, the war was over I think uh, uh, end of January in '45. This is it. All the people were liberated wherever somebody was. More people died after the war--I shouldn't say more but many people died because they started to eat, you know, a lot.

Too quickly, yeah.

Yes, and some people died of typhus and some people died of all kind of diseases, but some people just survived. And, my uncles survived--all of them. All of them have families. Beautiful wives, beautiful children. They all stayed there in Auschwitz. And, that's when we heard how it was. All the stories.