Auschwitz Liberation Anniversary: A Survivor’s Story
Source: Balkan Insight
Bergen-Belsen
As the war drew to a close, with Russian troops approaching from the east and Western armies tightening their grip on Germany from the west, the surviving Jewish prisoners were transported westwards.
Their clothes froze at night, and the dead were simply thrown off the trains, their bodies left by the tracks and roadside. Agnes contracted lice and typhus. “My mother said she couldn’t kill the lice, we’d have to wait until we got home. Somehow, we never gave up hope that we would make it back home. Being there for each other made us stronger,” she confesses.
The last stop was Bergen-Belsen, the deepest hell after all she had been through. There was no water. “We literally stumbled over the dead. Later, the corpses were piled up, some in the lower rows already decomposing. It was an unimaginable horror,” she recounts.
By the time the camp was liberated by the British Army in March 1945, Agnes was unable to walk and could only crawl on all fours.
But relief was still months away. After the camp was liberated, cars were waiting for the French, Greek and Belgian Jews, but the Hungarian state had seemingly little interest in picking them up. It was Agnes’s father, who miraculously survived forced labour and received word that his family were still alive in Bergen-Belsen, who managed to send someone to collect them. “It took us six days to make the journey. We finally returned on September 15, 1945,” she says.
But life at home was not easy either. The family’s property had been looted, and many Hungarians who had promised to keep a few valuables for them simply refused to return those. There was very little sympathy, and no official help or support. Agnes was once even told to her face that “too many Jews had returned”.
“Nothing and no one was left. Of the family, only my father, my mother and I remained,” she says. Even their property was promptly nationalised by the Hungarian Communist government.
Despite this, Agnes decided to stay. She studied veterinary medicine, had two failed marriages, but no children. “Jews were not welcome in Hungary. When I applied to university in the 1950s, my mother told me to remove the tattoo and to tell people I had been injured on a motorbike when they asked about my wounds,” she confesses.
In a strange twist of fate, she returned to Germany as a pensioner in 1988. The German state had offered restitution to Holocaust survivors, and she and her mother decided to take it. She spent ten years as a pensioner in Düsseldorf, using the money to travel the world. “I speak German, I have a German degree, I had German friends, but I still never felt at home. Some things never change. A friend’s father who returned from Siberia after eight years in captivity, and lost his eyesight, said: ‘I deserved it, because we did not win the war for Hitler!’ What a bastard, those Germans!” she says with passion.
Thirteen years ago, she returned to Hungary in search of companionship and, perhaps, of people with similar life stories. Now, on the eve of her 93rd birthday at the end of January, Darvas is battling several chronic illnesses, is mostly bedridden and receives daily care from the Hungarian Jewish Social Aid Foundation (MAZS), but her mind is still sharp.
She follows politics closely and is not happy with the way things are going. “There is just too much hatred in the world. Why should it matter if someone is Jewish, Catholic, Muslim or an Atheist?” she asks.
“[Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor] Orban is a scoundrel and a big thief, but one thing he cannot be accused of is being an antisemite. But unfortunately, there are still many in Hungarian society who are,” she says.
The original article: belongs to Balkan Insight .
