March 19, 1944 is etched in my memory forever. The day the Holocaust started in Hungary. This was the day the German Nazis occupied the country and linked arms with their Hungarian counterparts. This was the day when our lives, as we knew it then, was shattered forever and I was fifteen and a half years old, the seventh and youngest child in an Orthodox Jewish family. I had three brothers and three sisters.
 
 As I recall, life for us Jews in Hungary in general and for my family in particular wasn't
 exactly a bed of roses even before this event. Hungary was a military and ideological ally of
 Nazi Germany. After the Anschluss of Austria in 1938, discriminatory laws against the Jews
 were enacted and little by little we were stripped most of our civil and human rights.

 For my sister Klari and brother Leslie the most devastating was the edict called Numerus
 Nullus, which meant that Jewish students were no longer admitted to the universities. My father
 owned a scrap iron & metal yard. With the start of the war in 1939, the authorities revoked his
 business license because iron & metal became war material and Jews were no longer
 permitted to handle it. Nobody, in authority, cared how a family of nine should exist without
 any income.

 Life and living became more and more difficult but our lives were not yet threatened and
 somehow we were surviving - against all odds.

 On that fateful day, I remember standing at the window behind the curtains and watched in
 horror as the German Nazi troops were roaring in on motorcycles. A nauseating fear
 developed in my stomach at that moment and have not left me for decades to come.

 I recall that Passover was the last Jewish Holiday my parents and four of my seven siblings
 spent together in the year 1944. My three brothers were already gone to do forced labour,
 attached to the Hungarian army as virtual slaves. (Munkaszolgalatos.)

 Once the country was occupied, the pattern was the same in Hungary as in all other countries in
 Nazi occupied Europe. One edict after another was announced. We had to wear a specific size
 yellow star on the left side of our chest, on the outer garment, at all times. Which naturally
 made us vulnerable targets in public places. Our Jewish schools were closed. Jews had to give
 up all of their valuables, furniture, and anything else that the insatiable Nazi "appetite" desired
 to hoard or ship to Germany. One day my father was called to the Gestapo. They wanted our
 gold treasures that we didn't have. He came back with swollen feet for they beat the sole of his
 feet, but he never divulged what else happened to him.

 Then the order came for the creation of two ghettos in the predominantly Jewish district.

 We lived in the area of the city that became part of the ghetto. There were three dwellings
 situated around a courtyard and we had to open a huge iron door, from the street to enter. One
 house was ours, one belonged to my Uncle Vilmos, my father's oldest brother and his wife
 Sarolta. They were childless and to us, seven siblings, they were like grandparents. In the third
 dwelling lived another Auntie and Uncle with their two grown daughters. All these were
 simple dwellings, since we were not rich, but the many potted plants in the courtyard, my
 mother's favourites, made it colourful and scented the air, during the spring and summer. This
 was the eminently safe and happy world of my young childhood.

 So it happened that all members of our extended family moved in with us and my two uncles'
 homes. There seemed to be people everywhere. We were terribly overcrowded, especially at
 night when we all had to lie down somewhere to sleep. Wall to wall people.

 As a community, our isolation from the rest of the people in the city, was complete for they
 built a wall around the ghetto.

 I remember everyone was miserable. The women tried to make meals with the meager supplies
 but it was never enough. Lack of adequate food and medical supply, lack of freedom, lack of
 privacy made life seem more and more hopeless every day. However, little did we know how
 well off we were in comparison of what was to come later on.

 Then one horrible day it happened. The dreaded deportation, in cattle cars. I still see many of
 our neighbours lining the streets watching and laughing (there was the odd tear here and there)
 as we were led through the city to the brick factory. People with whom our parents were
 friendly for thirty some odd years how could they turn adversaries in a mere couple of years or
 some in a few months? It was difficult for my young mind to understand this and it is still
 incomprehensible.

 The "journey" in the cattle car took 3-4 days. How can one adequately describe the "inside" of
 the cattle car packed with 78 people? My father as a pious Jew, prayed, but I am sure he felt
 betrayed by his God. My mother cried, my 18 months old nephew whined constantly for food
 we didn't have and we, all 78 of us, wished for some water that no one supplied. The
 atmosphere in the cattle car, definitely foreshadowed of what was to come. For at the end of
 the "journey" we arrived to the hellhole of the world, a death camp called: Auschwitz
 Birkenau, in Nazi occupied Poland.

 The two men, prisoners themselves in striped clothing, whose job it was to get us all out of the
 cattle cars, kept shouting "los, los, heraus, schneller," were also telling the young women, who
 were with children, in a whisper: "give the children the grandmothers" and kept repeating it.
 No explanation why, just this urging. I didn't notice any woman, including my sister-in-law
 who was holding her 18 months old infant son, handing them over to their own mothers.

 Then, as we disembarked, we were instantly separated from the men, and that was the last time
 I saw my father. Children 14 or under were ordered to go with their mothers. Then came the
 infamous selection, by the "thumbs". High ranking SS officers using their thumbs only to
 indicate who goes where. To the left: women with children, pregnant women, older women
 (45 and up). To the right the rest of the young women.

 In a second I was torn from my mother without understanding what was happening or having a
 chance to say good bye. We didn't know we had to say good bye. At 15 1/2 this was pretty
 devastating.

 However, I was lucky for I had my three older sisters with me, at least for a little while. After
 having been stripped of our clothing, shaved of all our bodily hairs, humiliated and degraded
 by being forced to stand naked in front of all those SS men and women; allowed two minutes of
 cold shower and given a dress (really a piece of rag) to wear, we were marched to the camp
 that became our "home", camp B/III or Mexico.

 I remember we, my sisters: Evi Klari and Erzsebet ( Boeshke), cried through that night, along
 with everyone else, and then I never cried again till after the war.

 In Birkenau, even though we learned the next day, that all those who went to the left were
 killed by gassing, even though we lived with the constant stench of burning flesh, there was no
 time to mourn. Every ounce of our being was needed for survival and survival alone.

 We also realized, albeit too late, that those men who urged the mothers to hand over their
 children to the grandmothers, were really trying to save the lives of the young mothers. For they
 knew that the elderly and the very young will be murdered by gas anyway, regardless who held
 their little hands or carried their tiny bodies.

 In hindsight I can see that in Birkenau being a father didn't automatically sentenced a man to
 death. But being a mother with a child or pregnant, or just holding the little hand of a child,
 meant instant death.

 My dearly beloved oldest sister, Erzsebet, 27 at the time and a seasoned Socialist-Zionist,
 (Hashomer Hatzair) politically aware, understood clearly that here a genocide was happening
 and tried to make sure that we'll survive. The first thing she did she borrowed a knife and got
 hold of a piece of wood somehow and made four "spoons". With these spoons she "force-fed"
 us younger siblings by instructing us to hold our noses and try to swallow that awful looking
 and tasting "doergemuese" soup that was dished up to us as something edible. I still hear her
 voice: "surviving is a form of resistance" eat, eat and eat.

 The four of us sisters were unfortunately, in two stages, separated. First Klari (22) and Evi
 (18) were taken from Birkenau and till after the war I had no idea what happened to them.
 Months later, sometime after Yom Kippur, I was selected and torn from my last remaining
 sister, Erzsebet. . My selection was earmarked for gassing. Erzsebet, knew that. I could see the
 sadness in her eyes the way she looked at me, for the last time. She, later was sent to Stutthof
 concentration camp where she, miraculously, met up with Evi and Klari. She sadly reported to
 them that " Judit have been gassed".

 After the war I learned that I owe my life to those courageous six women who, as members of
 the resistance in Auschwitz, managed to smuggle out explosives from the factories they worked
 in, gave it to the men who worked at the gas chambers, who in turn blew up crema IV. After
 this incident the gassing of prisoners stopped. And that was my luck. Instead of being gassed
 the group was put on a train and we ended up in Bergen Belsen. Here, while in the beginning
 conditions were better then in Birkenau, quickly the situation deteriorated and large scale
 starvation set in. By now I reached the ripe old age of 16 and was all alone.

 The Feig Sisters, whom I knew personally from home, took pity on my solitude and at my
 request, I became their lagerschwester.(Camp sister). From then on we looked after each other.
 We three, shared absolutely every scrap of food. In a death camp it was very important to
 know that someone cared whether you woke up in the morning. Without the help and care of the
 Feig Sisters I would not have survived, I am sure of that.

 From Bergen Belsen, 500 of us, were taken to work in a Junkers airplane factory, in
 Aschersleben. Twelve hours of slave labour per day was very tough for our, by now, greatly
 weakened bodies. But, in comparison with death camps, the accommodation was good. It was
 January 1945, bitter cold and blissfully, the barracks were heated with huge, round, hot water
 pipes running through the rooms. The food improved too. I used to show the Feig sisters, "look,
 look there is a tiny bit of meat in here and lo and behold even traces of real potato." Joy, oh,
 joy!

 My foreman, in the factory was a French war prisoner called, Argo. 80% of all those who
 worked there were prisoners of one kind or another. All from Nazi occupied, oppressed
 Europe. There were small contingents of Nazi collaborators too, who came as " freiwilling
 arbeiter" to help the Nazi war effort. Some were from Belgium and some were, mainly women,
 from the Ukraine.

 Argo enlightened me who is who. Who I should trust and who I should not. Every time he
 wanted to indicate to me that something hopeful is happening, very, very quietly he'd sing the
 Marseilles.

 Then, eventually, the American Air Force came, the bombardments started and the factory was
 destroyed, levelled with the ground. Obviously the war was coming, slowly, too slowly for us,
 to an end.

 Once the factory was in ruins, from that day on we had no work. All our SS guards have
 disappeared overnight. Then the order came to be transported to Buchenwald. But this high
 ranking SS officer who was suppose to carry out the order, did not. Instead he ordered us to go
 on a "march" to nowhere. Just march and march he ordered and "supplied" us with Wermacht
 guards and he too disappeared.

 I have no idea how long this march lasted. Maybe two weeks. All I know is that we marched
 and starved, starved and marched for there was no supply of anything. I have no idea how the
 Feig sisters and I managed to survive. We lived and acted like animals. Raiding garbage cans,
 begging, ate rotten vegetables dug from the fields. I remember an overwhelming desire to eat
 and not to move my body, ever. Just eat and rest and get rid of the lice.

 Those who couldn't keep up were left by the wayside to die. Finally, this group of emaciated,
 dirty, bedraggled group of Jewish women were liberated, inadvertently, on May 5, 1945, by
 the American Army in a small town called: Duben. I think we numbered less than 200.

 The joy of liberation! Finally we got rid of of our dirty, filthy lice-infested clothing. We could
 wash and feel clean towels against our bodies. Clean clothing. And sleep in a bed with clean,
 bed linen. And eat and eat and eat and know that tomorrow we can eat again. And not to be
 afraid any more. All normal every day activities for most people but of which we were
 deprived of, for so long.

 Then when we became born-again human beings, the anguish set in. The question we all asked,
 I asked: do I still belong to anyone (?) or am I all alone on this earth? Where is the rest of my
 large family? In search of them I went back to Hungary. There I found my brother Leslie, in
 week condition, but he was there, he was alive. Then months later we learned that our sister
 Evi has also survived and is living in Germany in one of the D.P. camps. Leslie and I left
 Hungary, this time voluntarily and for good.

 Eventually, the three of us, had our tearful reunion. Evi told us that sisters Klari and Erzsebet
 died, practically in her arms, in Stutthof. Klari of malnutrition, literally starved to death.
 Elizabeth perished of pneumonia just about ten days before the liberation.

 While we were back in Hungary, Leslie and I learned that our two oldest brothers were killed
 in the Ukraine. My oldest brother Jeno was murdered along with 400 hundred other Hungarian
 Jewish men because they were in a hospital, sick with typhus, and the withdrawing Hungarian
 army instead of taking these men back with them, burned down the hospital. in Dorosits. Some
 men tried to crawl out of the fire and then were shot one by one by Hungarian soldiers.
 Luckily, three men managed to escape, to tell it all.

 Jeno's infant son and wife were murdered in the gas chambers of Birkenau. Father and son died
 in two different hells of the Nazi Era and they never laid eyes on each other. His wife, Magda
 was pregnant when he had to leave. My other brother Miklos, was last seen alive before a big
 battle at Voronyez. Most likely he was killed in that battle that wasn't his battle at all.

 The three youngest of my , once, large family survived. We managed to get to Canada in 1948
 and here we had a chance to rebuild our shattered lives.

 Eventually I married a wonderful, Canadian born man and we have a daughter and a son. My
 sister and brother never married and by now they are both dead. I no longer have anyone to
 share my childhood memories with. A special kind of void nothing can fill any more.

 While the memory of the death camps and being victims of the Holocaust never fades, still,
 through the decades, we accomplished a lot and found even happiness.