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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Limor Regev
a permanent legacy of the lost families and the world of my childhood.
It was two days before Rosh Hashanah, September 27, 1943.
It is important to note that many young Jews made a meager living and toiled, just like their neighbors. But the spotlight was on those who had amassed economic assets, gotten an education, and gained in status.
Hungarian Prime Minister Miklos Horthy was openly anti-Semitic and encouraged discriminatory decrees against the Jews.
this teacher took all the schoolbags of the Jewish children in the classroom, mine among them, and threw them out the window, saying we should all be sent to be cannon fodder for Hitler.
In 1942, based on the census data, the Hungarian authorities required the Jews of the area to show documented proof that their forebears had been residents of Hungary in 1855.
Among other things, they sent Jewish battalions into minefields either by vehicle or on foot, to detonate the mines with their bodies.
The Germans acted quickly and the story of the extermination of more than 500,000 Hungarian Jews towards the end of the war is one of the tragic events of the Holocaust.
The new decrees included a total prohibition on entering cafés, traveling by train, attending synagogue and going out in the streets after 6pm.
Only twenty-five years after the many Jewish soldiers of the First World War hung up their uniforms, their homeland turned its back on them and erased from its memory and consciousness the Jews who had fought for it.
The almost total collaboration of the Hungarian people and its contribution to the fate of the Jews of Hungary is one of the ugliest stains on the human race in the history of World War II.
“Birkenau|.” In this camp, the Nazis built most of the mass extermination facilities, where approximately one million European Jews were murdered. Birkenau was the largest concentration camp in the Auschwitz complex.
The fact is that I was afraid to say goodbye to my mother.
There was a valve in the ceiling, which opened only after the door hermetically locked and through which a chemical compound called Zyklon B was sprayed into the room.
and the ashes of the dead were used as fertilizer for the camp vegetable gardens and the surrounding fields.
We awoke every morning not knowing if we would be alive at the end of the day.
They took us to the showers. The Germans feared an outbreak of disease, so every time we went from camp to camp they sent us to shower and change clothing.
With special needles dipped in ink, they engraved a number into the flesh of our forearms.
In Auschwitz, I was no more a 13 and a half-year old boy named Moshe Kessler. I became A-4913.
We were so hungry all the time, so it was a great temptation. Some of us could not stand it, though it was clear that the person caught would be shot dead. The corpses of the ‘criminals’ who stole and paid for it with their lives were displayed at the entrance gate to the camp.
“This is the fate for anyone who steals a potato.”
On the day of the liberation of the camp, I was 14 and a half and weighed about 35 kilograms.
