Alexander Speiser

"My father was a month or a month and a half after a surgery and my mother... We sat together, the three of us, my brothers had already been taken to camps by the Hungarians, it was Horthy's policy that he needed workforce. My mother... My father laid a hand on my mum's hand, and my mother said: ,Son, I don't know what happens tomorrow, what happens the day after tomorrow, but wherever we get and you are with your father, take care of him. You must promise me this.' I swore, I promised to my mother that I would take care of my father. A promise was kept in our family. You said something and you had to do it. This was how we were educated."

"At midnight, two, three, I awoke. Weak, I dropped to all fours and crawled into a barrel that was there, I licked it inside all around for the remnants of food. While in this barrel, I felt asleep. In the morning, at five six o'clock, a truck would arrive, collect the barrels and the dead and put them on the truck. They go. They didn't see that I was in the barrel. A miracle: the truck drives and the barrel falls on the road just by the house where my father was. Directly. I crawled out of it, the driver didn't see that a barrel fell, I walked and saved myself. But they were very precise, the Germans, they were, a few hours before they recorded that there there were too many and here one too few, so they repeated it, I was like one more, and there they had on less, so in this way I saved myself

"One day they asked those who were weak and wanted to go somewhere where they would get more food and would work, to step out of the line. Me and my father stepped our, they gave us soap and took us to a gas chamber. We didn't know these were gas chambers and even if they had told us, we we wouldn't have believed. We stood there, waited and looked at the ceiling. They said we had to wash ourselves. We waited for water to pour down but water never poured down there, always only gas. Zyklone. And the gas failed. Suddenly they opened the door a told us: ,Get back, you are clean now.' We returned to the camp and didn't know we were saved."