Surviving Auschwitz and Slave Labour

"They say that people remember where they were when Kennedy was assassinated. [In Hungary, in 1944] I went out on the street [forced to wear a yellow star]. I started to cry. So I went back and I remember, I spoke to my mother. She hugged me and looked up. She told me, 'I don't believe in God anymore'. That moment is in here [his heart]. I can never forget."
"When they marched us to the ghetto, which was about eight kilometres or so, people were applauding. That made me very, very bitter about life."
"All I remember [on arrival at Auschwitz] is I see a German officer, very well dressed, in front of me as we were lining up. He just waved with his hand, left or right. I was pushed to the right with my father and my friend."
"My duty is to maintain the memory of these people [Holocaust victims]. This is the only weapon I have against the revisionists, to be an eyewitness to the truth."
Paul Herczeg, 87, Auschwitz and Muehldorf slave labour camp survivor

Still from video; Paul Herczeg, John Kenney/Montreal Gazette

The mother who was helpless to comfort her teen-age son over his anguish at having to wear a yellow star identifying him as a Jew, perished soon after arrival when she was separated from her husband and their only child, at Auschwitz. Her faith in God was extinguished, and her obvious surrender of hope was rewarded by the inexorable machinery of genocidal intent. Her husband, assigned to a work camp constructing an underground jet factory in a forest as a slave labourer lived only weeks longer than his wife.

In memory of the 70th anniversary of the day that American troops liberated him from a satellite camp of the Dachau concentration camp in Germany, Paul Herczeg shares his thoughts on surviving the excruciating experience of being marked for death, because of his genetic heritage. A fifth-generation secular Jewish family living in a suburb of Budapest. At the age of 16, he lost his 48-year-old mother, and soon afterward, his father. The Final Solution devised by the Third Reich was implacable and it was efficient.

About 430,000 Hungarian Jews were deported to Auschwitz, and of that number 325,000 were gassed by Zyklon B in the death chambers, their bodies incinerated into ashes. Their journey to Auschwitz from the ghetto they were initially herded into, saw them travel in crowded cattle cars. "Everyone was in shock" on arrival at the death camp, and two lines represented either the gas chamber or a labour camp. He watched briefly as his mother helped elderly people negotiate their way trustingly to the gas chamber for "showers".

A photo of Paul Herczeg taken 3 months after he was liberated from the Muhldorf slave labour camp.   John Kenney / Montreal Gazette

And he and his father as slave labourers were given a thousand calories for daily sustenance while they laboured twelve-hour shifts, day or night hauling and mixing sacks of cement for a vast underground jet factory, where the forest canopy hid all activity from Allied bombers. When his father died within six weeks of arrival, Mr. Herczeg attempted an escape. Emerging from his hiding place, an SS officer stopped him. Then took him and brought him to the kitchen barracks.

There he joined a half-dozen other youths peeling potatoes. The SS officer informed the young Paul, that from that time forward he would be employed in the kitchen. "He saved my life", Mr. Herczeg states. As the Allies made progress, prisoners at the camp were loaded onto trains heading for the Alps where the SS planned to make their last stand. The plan went awry when American troops intercepted the train, defying the Nazi plan to kill their prisoners.

In 1947, Mr. Herczeg immigrated to Canada where he started an import-export business, after performing a variety of start-up low-wage jobs. Since then, he has spoken of the Holocaust at schools, churches and on radio, to ensure that the memory of the Holocaust through his own experiences, would be kept alive.