Antonín Moťovič

“One night we suddenly hear that there’s a raid going on. They’re rounding up Jews, but only the ones from Hungary, for now. There’s a large city there, Kamenets Podolsk. By the way, the Czech Ministry of Defence didn’t know it existed, and I told them later on when we applied for the two-fifty-five and that we had been there. Later, they acknowledge I was right, that it really was like that. In the course of a few nights, the Germans shot 28,000 people with the assistance of the Hungarians, with the help of the local inhabitants, who gathered us up. Kamenets Podolsk. No one or hardly anyone knows about that, but we were among that number, all lined up in the street to join the transport to Kamenets Podolsk. I’ll never ever forget about that. Suddenly they pulled us out of the line, the whole family. [Q: Who did?] I don’t know, I don’t know. It’s true that back then there were Jews in the Hungarian army who served as lorry drivers. In a Hungarian uniform with a white armband.”

“We – my mum, three children, and also Mum’s sister-in-law and brother-in-law – we set off the earliest day possible in the night on the one side of the Dniester, there where he told us to go. A kilo of sugar, and they took us across in rowing boats. The Dniester was flooded, it washed my sister somewhere far off, and it took us several hours to find her, but she got out somehow or other. We wouldn’t all fit into one boat. Then we were ambushed by the locals in the night; my sister still has a big scar from that, and they stole everything we had there, those few sugar cubes. But what they took, they took with them and left. So we got to the closest town, Nadworna it was called, to some family, and we gave all we had left to one man who guided us over the Carpathians back to Subcarpathian Ruthenia.”

“We went there. We were there for some two or three weeks. We were among the last people in the ghetto. In the meantime my brother – who hadn’t been accepted to grammar school – trained as a car mechanic, and the Gestapo in Khust took him in to care for their cars. And that’s why we were among the last to go, in the last transport. They brought in some cattle wagons on the siding, stuffed 45–50 people into them, a big barrel for weeing and pooing into, and off we went. We only saw through a wired-up window at the top, we never opened it. But before that, we travelled in the direction of Slovakia, through Slovakia to Poland, to Auschwitz, to Osviecim. There were Eisenbahners at the station in Košice in Slovakia, they tapped our wheels and told us: ‘Don’t worry, the second front has started, the Americans have crossed the sea, they’re starting to conquer Germany.’ But we were already in the wagons.”

“I must say that it was without violence or anything, we didn’t put up a fight either; they sat us into cars again and took us over the border. I remember that as a child – I was fourteen years old in the year forty-one. I remember that as the most horrible experience, not in the concentration camp, but I’d never had such a shock at the time. My brother had his wits about thouigh, he didn’t go with us on the hay wagon. There were carts with hay or farm produce that went to Khust in the morning. It was market day in Khust. He joined them and went with them and wasn’t with us. We later found out that it didn’t matter – he came there, started living there, and that was that. When we came out the second time, we reckoned: ‘We’ll wait until the night, we’ll be wiser this time, we won’t say hi to all the workers, not with any families, but also by road, in some wagon...’ We didn’t have anything to give, but hopefully there would be someone who’d take us to Khust. And so we got back to Khust.”