“I passed through Mengele’s hands tree times. I was very young at that time and he was looking for young girls for work. They had to have good eyesight, because the work we did involved tiny wires for aircraft lights. Mengele conducted selections as the trains were arriving and people were getting off. He assigned a person depending on how he liked them. He pushed my mother to the wrong side right away. And my sister too, but he heard her calling ‘mom’ and he thus returned her to our side, because she was young and she was good for work. I passed through the selection three times. The first time when I arrived to Auschwitz, the second time when they selected us for work, and for the third time it was before we went to Germany to work in a factory there. He was checking whether we were able to do what they needed. He was a handsome man, he really was a good-looking and polite man. At that time we did not know that he was such a murderer. To us he was a doctor.”
“The Englishmen were already there (in Bergen-Belsen – ed.’s note). My sister had typhus, and she could not walk any more and she told me: ‘Go and look outside, something is happening there.’ I just walked out of the barrack and there were about twenty girls from our block. We were telling each other that we were liberated. But not far away from us there were a German and a Hungarian warden and they told us to go inside. We thus went inside, but they did not wait and they started shooting at us. I got hit in my neck and hand. The bullet which grazed me on my neck killed the girl who was standing behind me. She was tall and she got hit in her heart. The bullet which only scratched me killed her. I got hit into my hand and there were no bandages there, but later the Englishmen helped me. They placed me into barracks where the SS men had stayed before.”
“My sister was already sick, but she had a tin with an apple compote. That was something... She told me to go out and find some English soldier and ask him to open the tin for us. I walked out and I grabbed a soldier and in German I asked him if he could open the tin for us. He asked me in German where I was from. I said that I was from Carpathian Ruthenia. He asked me where it was. I replied that it Czechoslovakia. And he answered in Czech: ‘Can’t you speak Czech then?!’ He was a Czech and an English major. He opened the tin for us and he stopped a jeep with a soldier and he ordered him to take me to a hospital. I still had paper bandages on me. The soldier was taking me here and there but they did not want to admit me anywhere. Eventually they placed me to a quarantine room for typhus patients, but I did not have typhus, but they did not believe me. During the first night that I was there, my girl friends from Uzhhorod were dying there in the room next to me, but I have stayed alive…”
Magdalena Swinkelsová, née Hackerová, was born in a Jewish family in Uzhhorod. When this area of Carpathian Ruthenia became occupied by Hungary in 1939, the family suffered many hardships. Magdalena was dismissed from school and her father and one of her brothers died. The Jewish population of Uzhhorod faced various restrictions and they were forced to live in a ghetto. The critical situation culminated in April 1944 when Magdalena together with her sisters and mother left with a transport for Auschwitz-Birkenau. The family got separated on the arrival ramp in Auschwitz. Magdalena remained with only one of her sisters, and she then continued together with her through the many concentration and labour camps as the Nazi war industry needed human labour. After an exhausting death march Magdalena eventually got to the concentration camp in Bergen-Belsen. In spite of the ever-present horror, there were signs that she would after all live to see the liberation. As the English army was approaching, the wardens were hastily leaving the camp. In the ensuing chaos the emaciated girls summoned courage to open the door of their barrack and look out. A warden started shooting into the group of the curious and devastated female prisoners. He shot eight of them to death. Magdalena was hit in her hand and neck. Fortunately, English soldiers were not far away and they provided the necessary aid. After the war she married and moved to Karlovy Vary and later in the 1970s she married in Belgium, and from there she has travelled almost the entire world. At present Magdalena lives in Karlovy Vary. Magdaléna Swinkelsová died on 16 May 2019.
