Vera Schey - June 10, 1994
Last Days of the War
Tell me about the last days of the war.
The last days uh, bombs were falling constantly. There was no air raid and you ran out on the street because you had to, as I say, for water, for trying to get some bread or whatever. There were shots everywhere you went. You felt like you were in the middle of the war zone. And everybody was running and, and you saw German uniforms and you saw the Arrow Party. And you heard the shots from the other side, which you knew are already from the other side of the bridge, which was already Russian.
From Buda.
From Buda. And we--this particular place where we were was very close to a, a bridge, which by the way was bombed. That, that particular bridge exploded by accident. Some, some explosives were thrown down or whatever. This was not uh, this was not bombed or it was not destroyed by...
Germans.
...by, by Germans or by Russians. That exploded for--I don't remember the reason, but I know that was the one bridge which exploded before the others. The rest of them were uh, done by the Germans before they fled so that the Russians cannot--they came from that side, from the Buda side--that they cannot--that they shouldn't be able to cross. So after the uh, liberation uh, for weeks you could not cross over to Buda because there was not one bridge which was standing. So boats went and...
Boats? They came by boats.
Yeah, but it was February. You know, it was cold and it was ice. I don't, I don't know how--for the longest time you could not go from one side of the city to the other. The liberation itself... It was interesting. We thought, now it's all--we are safe, we are finally--we have wonderful--Russians are here now. They will take care of us, everything will be wonderful. So about three or four days after the liberation, until then there was such a chaos on the streets that you really didn't dare to go out. Uh, these two young men who were hiding with us went out and went to the Russians. Well one of them was thrown in, into one of the trucks and taken to work and was going to be taken away from Hungary. He escaped. Somewhere he was able to jump out. They threw him in, he could say he was Jewish, it didn't make any difference. So we already knew that it's not so wonderful to have the Russians there. Still, it was life saving. Uh, so about four or five or maybe six days after the Russians came in and the ??? was liberated and the Germans were not there anymore, my mother and I went to see our apartment. What is the first thing you want to see if you have a home? If your home is there. So we went back and that one room which had all our furniture was still locked up with the uh, official lock on it from the Hungarian government. And the other rooms where we could--as I told you was left open, the kitchen, the bathroom and another room was there. It was intact.
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