"My son, my son, I've found my son!" Vilmos cried out.
Just then an SS guard wandered by and noticed the silence of the assembled group. He looked at Vilmos, who explained again, without any hesitation, that he had found his son.
The astonishing reply of the SS guard: "Well, go and hug your son."
Vilmos and Suti embraced in a tearful reunion that touched all the assembled. As Suti put his arms around his father, he realized he could feel his ribs. Still, it was amazing to be reunited with him again.
Vilmos and Suti remained in Mauthausen together, spending their days completely occupied with the constant gnawing feeling of hunger in their stomachs. The other activity was the never-ending task of removing lice from their bodies and clothes.
On March 12, 1945, less than two months before the collapse of the Third Reich, the last constructed concentration camp, Gunskirchen, was opened. That same day was Suti's fifteenth birthday. Gunskirchen was built from the logs cleared right out of the forest. Built because of the overcrowding at Mauthausen, Gunskirchen consisted of six or seven huge hangar-type structures assembled out of the freshly cut tree trunks. Long and wide, each hangar had a few doors but no windows. The floors were hardened mud. Suti and Vilmos, both suffering from typhus, were herded into one of these hangars. There were two or three thousand men in each hangar with barely room to sit or lie down.
On the last day before they were liberated in early May, an SS guard came into their hangar and tried to get their attention. By this time the inmates sensed that changes were imminent - there was a lot of noise in the hangar and they barely paid attention to the guard. The SS guard took out his revolver, pointed it at the inmate sitting directly next to Suti, and shot him in the forehead, killing him instantly. Bits of blood and brain spattered onto everyone around him, including Suti. The killing silenced everyone. Then the guard yelled something unintelligible and left. The next day all the guards simply vanished.
Gunskirchen was the last concentration camp to be built by the Germans and the last liberated by the Allies.
chapter 20 | spring 1945
WHEN GUNSKIRCHEN WAS LIBERATED in the first days of May 1945 by the 71st Infantry of the United States Army, most of those still alive there reacted with shock, disbelief, and gratitude. The guards had fled four days before. The liberators found nearly ten thousand bodies in a huge communal grave. But what really shocked them was the indescribably awful smell of the place.
The liberators were greeted with cheers, shrieks, and groans. They stopped in their tracks from complete disbelief of what they were witnessing: the skeletal shells of human beings.
The well-dressed and fed American soldiers, desperate to do something immediately for these poor unfortunate souls, started handing out boxes of food and cigarette rations. Some survivors simply fell upon the food rations and devoured them, including the tobacco rations. After so many months of starvation rations, their digestive tracts could not absorb the rich caloric foods, such as cold corned beef, and they died shortly after consuming the army rations.
Suti and Vilmos simply stared at the soldiers, and at the box of food rations handed to them, which they didn't have the strength to open. The army commanders asked a Hungarian-speaking survivor to translate for them. "Don't leave this place. The commanders are pleading with us not to go - they will look after us here. They will have water and food and medics for everyone in a matter of hours. Don't go, there is nowhere to go to."
But a type of mass hysteria took hold of the survivors, who simply wanted to leave this hellhole. The emaciated father and son, Suti and Vilmos, both sick with typhus, their bodies covered in lice, trudged out of Gunskirchen.
The road leading out was clogged with hundreds of survivors walking slowly but determinedly, many hanging on to relatives or friends, trying to place as much distance between themselves and this place of horrors as possible. Joining the parade of fleeing skeletons, not knowing how they were mustering the strength, Suti and Vilmos walked and kept going until they found themselves in front of a house in the nearby town of Wels. They stopped and knocked on the door of a stranger. After what seemed like many minutes, an elderly Austrian woman tentatively opened the door and peered out. The old woman couldn't hide the look of shock on her face. Neither she nor her visitors said anything as the two pushed past her and walked into the house. She closed the door and followed them inside.
They walked to the back to the kitchen and sat down on handcrafted wooden chairs that surrounded a small wooden table. The kitchen was sparsely decorated. They simply stared at her.
"I have no food, nothing to eat," she began, wringing her hands and looking very nervous. "My husband and son are gone - lost on the front. There's no one here but me - I have nothing to give you. I have lost everything during this war. I've lost my entire family."
The silence in the room was deafening. Minutes passed. Then, she noticed Suti and Vilmos scratching themselves and realized that she had to act quickly to prevent the lice from spreading. She collected herself, put some water on the stove, and lit the fire underneath. She made tea and introduced herself as Frau Hans Asen. Pouring hot water in a pan, she led them into the garden and motioned for them to wash themselves. Finding some clean clothing from her husband and son, she suggested they change and directed them to throw their lice-infested clothing into the fireplace in the garden. She then lit a fire under the filthy clothes.
Within a day or so, trucks with loudspeakers roamed around the district announcing that a place had been prepared for camp survivors. The American army gathered the survivors into a German military facility, which had been the last active airbase of the Luftwaffe at Horsching. The airbase was transformed into a place where survivors would be able to gather their strength and obtain meals.
Suti and Vilmos were transported to the base. They lived in a room originally intended for five or six soldiers, but now housed twenty or more concentration camp survivors. They slept on straw mattresses and blankets strewn about on the floor, most still comatose and dazed from their experiences, some dying, some recovering. The daily death rate of the survivors was sizeable: some seventy to one hundred dead bodies were removed from the facility to be buried in a mass grave designated as such in front of the building.
The American army was not prepared to deal with this legacy of the war - there were no kitchens set up to prepare hot food. They were provided with bread, tea, and some other food supplies, but survivors frequently helped themselves to U.S. rations in the storage areas.
Suti realized that his father was gravely ill, but didn't want to face the reality of the situation. He continued to bring his father tea and coaxed him to eat a bit of bread, but most of the time Vilmos didn't even open his eyes. When he did, Suti noticed he had a distant, dazed look in his eyes. Suti needed his father, however, now more than ever.
An American Jewish doctor who was a major in the U.S. Army created a clinic to rehabilitate those concentration camp survivors who were, in his assessment, capable of regaining their strength. Suti was chosen to go to this ad hoc clinic nearby in Horsching. Choking back tears, trying to put on a brave face, Suti said goodbye to his dying father, who was by then in a comatose state. But Suti's anxiousness was turning into anger by this point: anger toward the remoteness of his father. Why wouldn't he snap out of his haze? They were free now, he was getting medication and nutrition, and more than ever Suti needed his guidance and help. Why was he shutting himself off from his son?
Suti spoke straight to him, saying his final farewells. No response came. No motion, no sound was made as Suti left, feeling his father had already abandoned him.
At the clinic, Suti fell into a deep sleep that lasted ten days. He was fed intravenously. When he came to, no one could explain to him whether he had fallen into a coma, or had slept so long and so deeply from sheer exhaustion.
Suti awoke one morning to overhear the attending doctor telling the nurse that he was being sent to a sanatorium in Switzerland for lon
g-term treatment and recovery. Suti knew that under no circumstances did he want to be sent west. He grabbed some clothes out of a closet and made his way surreptitiously out of the clinic and back to the base where he left his father. On arrival, he was told that Vilmos Weisz had passed away on May 22, 1945. To the great chagrin of Suti, he learned his father had been buried in the mass grave at Horsching Air Force Base, directly in front of the building where they had been housed.
In May 1945, the fifteen-year-old concentration camp survivor found himself completely alone in the world. At that point in his life, he felt the tremendous pull of home. There was only one direction he wanted to go: east, back home to Nagyszollos.
chapter 21 | spring 1945
THE SPRING OF 1945 was particularly cold and rainy in Europe. It was as if nature were trying to cleanse itself of the immense amount of blood, death, and hatred that had spilled onto the continent during the war.
Tibor and Bela learned of the end of the war in Europe while sleeping in a barn, near Altenfelden in Austria, along with thousands of former combatants, Hungarians and Germans, under the watchful eye of American soldiers. The German soldiers threw their caps in the air, yelled, and became hysterical with joy. The war was over - nothing mattered anymore. They had had enough. They were going home. Some cried from happiness.
The reaction of the Hungarians was more muted. No one knew what the future held. Bela had a feeling of more hardship ahead. Tibor's only thought was to find Hedy.
The previous day they had been registered and ordered to head out on a march.
Not having any idea where they were going, they were allowed to bring their belongings - anything they could carry in their backpacks.
They marched in platoon formation, and stayed mainly on country roads. The march led through the Austrian countryside, traversing hills and valleys, through oddly quiet villages. Intermittently, along the roadside, in ditches and ravines the bodies of dead soldiers remained from recent local skirmishes. By mid-morning, as the rays of the sun grew hotter and hotter, the marching men began throwing away heavy gear, raincoats, extra jackets, and boots.
As they marched, Bela tried to retrace how they had ended up here and all that had happened to him in the last half year. The military school Bela attended was transferred to Sopron, the westernmost city in Hungary, then disbanded completely. As one of the school's oldest cadets, Bela was ordered to gather up the youngest class, fifteen eleven-year-olds, and spirit them out of harm's way to Austria. The group of frightened cadets joined the hundreds of thousands of fleeing civilian refugees. They were desperately trying to maintain a distance from German and Russian lines, but roads were bombed and became impassable; they came under frequent fire. Despite it all, walking most of the way under deplorable conditions, Bela, incredibly, delivered the young boys to safety.
Once in Austria, Bela found his older brother, Tibor, whose unit had been pushed westward and disbanded near a small town called Altenfelden. The men were assigned to live with farm communities, along with other military personnel and their families. The brothers pitched in with the chores at a dairy farm - they milked cows and delivered the milk to the surrounding farms.
As they approached, the American forces destroyed much of the old town of Altenfelden with tank bombardments. Two American soldiers arrived at the farm where the brothers lived and demanded that all exmilitary report for inspection in the yard. The American soldiers were inebriated and repeatedly shot rounds of ammunition into the air - one narrowly missed Bela's ear. They shouted questions that no one understood and seemed to become increasingly incensed that no one was able to provide answers. The Hungarian solders and some non-commissioned officers were frozen with fear. The intimidation continued for hours. Eventually the Americans grew tired of this and left.
Within two days, more American soldiers in jeeps arrived. Tibor and Bela watched from an upstairs window of the farmhouse as the vehicles screeched to a halt below. Tibor looked at his brother and whispered, "I bet they didn't count us the first time."
"They were too drunk," Bela added.
Without saying another word to each other, the brothers slipped quietly behind a wardrobe upstairs, listening to what was going on outside from their hideout.
The yelling continued as before, and once again gunshots were fired. This time, however, the Americans not only lined up the men, but to their families' great consternation, marched them away. Everyone assumed they were being taken to some kind of registration and holding facility.
When Tibor and Bela came out of hiding, they saw that only the women and children were left. Some of the women were happy to see that there were still two able-bodied men remaining to perform the daily back-breaking labour that needed to be completed around the farm. But one woman, Ilona Nagy, the wife of a sergeant major, accosted them when she found out they had stayed behind.
Jabbing her finger at Tibor's face, she yelled in a shrill voice, "Don't think for a moment you'll get out of this. If you don't go after the rest and report to the Americans, I'll report you myself!"
Tibor could see that Ilona Nagy had once been a stunning woman. She still had a voluptuous figure, even after nine children, but her long brown hair was unkempt, with streaks of grey running through it. She tied it up in a bun, loosely, but some strands fell out into her eyes and face. It was obvious the years, the children, and the war had taken their toll on her, she had become slovenly about her appearance.
When Tibor and Bela didn't react, her angry tirades continued and became more frenzied. Bitterness and exhaustion became evident in her eyes and face. Her lips were moving and words were pouring out, but the real meaning behind her rant soon became evident.
"Why should my husband suffer in some holding facility run by the Americans while you two, who have enjoyed a privileged upbringing as the sons of a colonel, enjoy freedom?"
Tibor and Bela realized there was no way this woman would stop her tirade against them until they left. Bela couldn't understand any of it: if they left, there would be no one left to do the heavy tasks. Ilona Nagy relied on the two brothers for practically every task, from bringing in water from the well early in the morning to milking the cows and transporting the milk for sale to the neighbouring communities. They were of invaluable help to her in looking after her children and making sure they were provided for.
Resigned to their fate, Tibor and Bela packed a few things in preparation: dried smoked meat, canned sardines, extra socks, underwear, a shaving kit, and as much clothing they could take for what they suspected would probably be difficult times ahead. Tibor hammered together a little cart using the wheels of a discarded baby carriage so they could pull their few worldly possessions behind them in a wooden crate.
Currency was worthless by the end of the war in Europe. Jewellery and gold were the only items that were worth anything, as they were always good for barter and trade. The brothers acquired a range of watches. They placed the cheapest ones closest to their wrists, the more expensive ones were placed higher up, closer to the elbow. Under long sleeves, all the watches were hidden, but if they were stopped by robbers on the road, the brothers always had an inexpensive watch to reluctantly hand over.
They knew they had to find an imaginative hiding place for the few pieces of gold jewellery and U.S. dollars they had between the two of them. It had to be in a place no one would even think to look. Tibor spliced the end of a tube of toothpaste open, extricated some of the toothpaste, then gingerly pushed the jewellery and cash into the flat end and rolled it up.
As they walked along the country roads, Bela felt full of foreboding, but reassured himself that all this had to be over soon and they would be going home.
When they arrived at a rocky hillside with small springs running down from it, they were allowed to pause for a cool drink of water. Bela removed his shoes and socks and washed his aching feet. It was a method he had learned in military school - a way to increase circulation and renew your strength while hiking. Soon the en
tire platoon was following his example. As a result, their group picked up the pace.
Not having any idea of where they were going, they sang as they marched. Some of the American soldiers guarding them were impressed - their enthusiasm was rewarded with the occasional cigarette, chocolate bar, and stick of chewing gum. By comparison, the other platoons were dragging their feet.
It was late in the afternoon on the second day when they arrived at a farmer's freshly ploughed potato field just beyond the village of Tittling in Austria. Tibor stopped, taken aback by the sight before them: as far as they could see thousands of men were crowded onto the muddy field. Many were dressed in military khakis, some were in civilian clothing.
The entire area sloped down to the bottom of the hill, where a small creek flowed, with just a trickle of water running through it. On the other side of the creek stood thousands of German soldiers, jammed in, encircled on all sides with barbed-wire fences.
The platoon Tibor and Bela were part of was directed to the bottom of the hill, to the first row, directly adjacent to the small creek.
Once they were assigned their spot, Tibor looked around more carefully, squinting his eyes to see that there were many young boys and teenagers in the crowd as well. Not quite believing what he was witnessing, he made sure his eyes weren't playing tricks on him, but upon closer examination became convinced that there were twelve-, thirteen-, and fourteen-year-olds here with them, swept up in the net of postwar sortings.
As Tibor looked around, he guessed that, similar to his younger brother, every tenth person was simply too young to have taken part in any combat. He surmised they were probably members of a compulsory youth military league, the Leventes. Or, he wondered, could there have been that many cadets still remaining at military schools?
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