it was too expensive to bribe the official,” Lipa recalls. “My father returned home for the feasts of Rosh Hashanah and Passover, and two more children were born.” During that period, the fate of the Jews was bound to the success of the Germans. The worse the war went, the more ferocious the SS became. “After the fall of Stalingrad in 1943 and the beginning of the German retreat, the Nazis started to deport the Jews to Ukraine, and the Ukrainians killed them by every means possible. They took families out onto the Dniester River, or killed them in the forests with axes and knives. When the Russians approached our area, the Jews were banned from leaving the villages. I was allowed to work in the forests, but not to enter a non-Jewish house.”
The Hungarian regime under Horthy understood that the war was coming to an end, and withdrew its army to the east. The Germans entered, and together with the Hungarian fascists they began to confine the Jews to ghettos. “In April of 1944, at the end of Passover, when my father was at home, we were told to pack our bags, one bag weighing forty pounds for each person, and to get ready to leave our home. The next day we were deported to the ghetto of a city named Mukachevo. There was no water, no bathrooms or kitchens. Whole families packed together, one next to another. There were no medicines, and the sick died, the elderly died. Every day the bodies were burned in the communal crematory in the cemetery. We cooked potatoes and beans, and every day a list was drawn up of the people to be deported to Auschwitz.”
Lipa Weiss would be one of the few Jewish survivors of the death machine of Adolf Eichmann, who deported the entire Hungarian Jewish community to the gas chambers. The Ungarische Aktion was the apex of the German capacity for extermination. About one-third of the victims of Auschwitz came from Hungary. Twelve thousand Hungarian Jews arrived every day, and Eichmann needed just twenty officers and a hundred functionaries to annihilate one of the largest Jewish communities in Europe.
Lipa remembers very clearly the time he saw the SS: “They were looking for the important men in the community. They pulled them out of the roll-call line, in front of their wives and children, and began to torture them. They ordered them to remove their hats, cut off their beards, and whipped them to the point of exhaustion. For us, these men were the highest authorities, models of honesty, morality, and piety, and they were publicly humiliated. When they were no longer able to react, they were left to die where they were lying. The stronger ones, who stayed alive longer, were shot. On the lists were the names of the people to be deported—entire families, the sick, pregnant women, the elderly.”
Then came the day of deportation. “No one was allowed to bring more than ten pounds of luggage. There was barbed wire on the boxcar windows, and when the deportation began the German and Hungarian prisoners began shouting. Everyone, regardless of age or physical ability, had to get into the boxcars. An SS official checked to make sure they were full. We had no food or water. We didn’t know where they were taking us, but we were on the train for four days. At the few stops, they threw out the urine and feces. Without warning, the train arrived at its destination. The doors were opened, and we were ordered to get out fast, without taking anything with us. We came down a ramp, and that was the first time we saw the prisoners who were already there. Their job was to separate the men from the women and children. I don’t know how, but suddenly I found myself among the men. My mother, my seventeen-year-old sister, who was holding my one-year-old brother, and the other children all disappeared, and I didn’t see them anymore. It was night, and they took us away. In a camp, the SS inspected us to see who was able to work. Those who were able went to the right; otherwise they joined the women and children.”
Lipa looked out between two strands of barbed wire. “On my left, I saw the smoke of the crematories, and what looked like dead bodies being lifted by the hands and feet and thrown into the fire. We heard terrible screams. Later we found out that the gas chambers were there. They divided us into groups of ten and ordered us to run. We hadn’t had any food or water. We came to a big shower room, where the men and women were stripped and beaten, and examined to see if they were hiding any valuables. The hot water was turned on for a few minutes, and then suddenly it turned cold. We went into another room where the barbers cut our hair. We were given a uniform, a hat, and an aluminum mess tin. That was all we had left in the world.” The mess tin was the most important thing—without it you didn’t eat. “The next morning, the men and women walked in two parallel lines. I saw the girls from my section, and I could see who had survived and who hadn’t. I was the only one left from my family. All the others, my parents, sisters, brothers, the relatives with us on the train, they were all exterminated the night before.”
Only Lipa and a cousin on his father’s side were still alive. “From there we went to the barracks of Birkenau; we spent hours in the Appellplatz, famished and exhausted. We had not had anything to eat or drink since the ghetto. We had to support the prisoners who were about to fall down. The barracks was full of beds. We had to ask permission to go to the toilet, which was a barrel with planks on it. They ladled vegetable soup into our mess kits; the Germans called it Durgensuppe. It had no flavor, but we had to fill our stomachs. During those two terrible weeks, the journey by train, the time in the barracks, I had to learn to live in a new way. In the ghetto, I had slept with my parents, I had a blanket, but here I was alone. The few things I had to make my life happy had been taken away from me when I got on the train. There was no drinking water. We had to bathe ourselves standing up, in front of the others. How could human beings do this? The only things of your own were your shoes, and if they were good shoes you would live longer; you had less chance of getting sick. Any kind of help, like giving someone a glass of water, was forbidden. If you helped a sick person, you were risking your own life. The sick and the injured were left where they were until they died. If they were lucky, they went to the Revier, a sort of hospital. There you were subjected to every sort of medical experiment until you died. Those who could work went to Commando X or Y; those who couldn’t went to Commando Himmel, the clinic. And then they were burned in the crematory. You always had to watch what was happening around you. The policy of the Germans was always Vernichtung, annihilation. And there were two ways of achieving this: gassing the unfit, the women, the children, the sick, and the elderly; and working the fit to death. The saying was Vernichtung durch Arbeit.”
Lipa was always thinking about his loved ones. “You thought about your parents who had died in that horrible way, and about the fact that you were left alone. There was no one to tell you what was happening. But the others were all alone, too. There were some who were trying to make it through the pain, and some who just couldn’t. They threw themselves against the high-voltage wires, or killed themselves in other ways. In Auschwitz, I thought that I would be strong, the Germans would need me. One day we were taken to the train station in Birkenau. The orchestra was playing. Our only ‘property’ was the mess kit and a piece of bread. The train left in the evening, and the bread was our only food for four days. We had no water.”
On a Sunday morning, the train stopped in Mauthausen, in Austria, not far from where Hitler was born. “We walked for four miles, toward an uninhabited place, and on a hill we could see guard towers. And the SS opened the huge gate. We entered the Appellplatz. There were two marble buildings in front of us, built by the prisoners with stones from the nearby quarry. From the balcony, the commandant informed us of the rules we had to follow. After that, we went through another door. The ground was covered with gravel, and there were barracks on both sides. On the right were the gas chambers, the crematory, and the laundry. Our barracks were empty, no tables or beds. We had to state our names and birthdates, one by one. They told you that from that moment on, you would be called by your registration number. My name was 68.864. When they called out your name, you had to respond ‘Jawohl,’ that’s me. That number was stamped on both of my pants legs and on my jacket, together with a red triangle and the letter J.” It was the initial for Juden, Jew.
“In the afternoon, they gave us soup and three and a half ounces of bread, and we were sent to the barracks for the night. It was the end of June, it was hot, the sun was blazing, and we were not given anything to drink. There were no mattresses, and we were crammed together side by side. Our sleep was disturbed by cries and wails of pain. We stayed like this
