Rivka Reich (age 4), Oradea, Hungary, 1944:

Our soap factory backed onto the railway station where they took Jews to Auschwitz. We thought going to Auschwitz would be just hard labour; we didn’t think further. But my father was different. He thought we must escape.

People thought that they would go to Auschwitz & come back & find all their riches. My father & grandfather as well. They hid their silver & money in the ground. When the SS came, they knew that the Jews did that so, they interviewed him & they… I don’t know how to say it. They really hurt him, with electric wires. All full of blood. So he told them straightaway where everything was. Nobody wanted to be killed for that.

That was the beginning of the terrible times. After that my father was trying to think how we can escape, how we can go. Then he thought: in the actual factory there was a loft with a roof, one more floor, never used, but you could go up. He thought maybe we could hide there.

We had a non-Jewish manager, called Appan. He was very nice to us. They offered him a house & my mother's diamond ring. He said, 'I'll look after you, hide into this rooftop. Your wife, yourself & your two children. I'll bring food & look after you for as long as needed.'

My father told my grandfather about it, my grandfather was very upset. He said 'Why don’t you come with us to Auschwitz? You will be able to work for us, we are elderly people'. My father said 'no.' My grandfather was terribly upset.

After that all the people came to speak to my father. He was considered something quite special in town: very clever, very capable. They came all to him: 'Herr Rothbart, maybe you can think of something to save us.'

My father told one person, Yankel Schreiber, 'I'm thinking of going into the loft.' 'Can we come with?” So they came, with six children, so there were eight people. My mother took us for a bath in the Mikveh. Berish Weiss saw her there & said 'What are you going to do?' My mother said 'We are going to hide. Come with us.' Another three people. And it grew. The Schreibers came, and then there was a Mrs Fuchs who was a widow with two children, she came as well. My nanny came and a few other young men who were begging to come.

It turned out that at the end of the day we were 28 people instead of 4. Which was a tremendous thing, it was a small area, we could just about lie down, we couldn’t walk around, the facilities were just a bucket & only food we survived with was what this fellow brought for four people. We could hear from the window, still now I can hear it, the footsteps of the SS with the big boots, it was so frightening.

But people laid down, because when people laid down they don’t move so much. My father said 'If everybody lies down you save energy, & they don’t hear you either”, at night especially. If somebody fell asleep, if they made the slightest noise, that was terrible, so one of us was always up to see that nobody should make a noise & nobody should move. At night noises are always amplified. Just below we could see them walking up & down, taking the people from the ghetto to Auschwitz.

Appan brought chazzer [non-kosher meat] with whatever he had. I was allowed to eat it, because I was 4. If a 4-year-old child starts crying or makes the slightest noise, everybody gets endangered, so I was allowed to eat it. Hakadosh Baruch Hu [God] definitely helped all the way, because I didn’t cry. If I wanted to cry or be upset I cried in a cushion & never raised my voice.

I had to learn to speak only quietly. For quite a while afterwards I had no voice.

I still remember what they used to cook: if he brought some beans, somebody would hold a pan over a candle. That's how we cooked the beans, you can imagine hours standing there, but whatever food they could get would keep us going.

They davened [prayed]. We were petrified all the time. There was not a time when we were not, we never could relax. The slightest noise. Rats crawling over you. I coped because my parents were very loving. We suffered, but compared to what people suffered in Auschwitz it was nothing.

I can still feel it, I never talked about it for years. But my mother talked about the war a lot: 'We have to talk about the miracles. We are so lucky we are saved, we are saved for something, not just for nothing. There is a purpose in life why we are saved’.

She never took it for granted & all her life she had a purpose in life, she helped people, they both did. In those days there were no committees but all their life they helped all war victims, anyone who was victim of anything. They were there to help until their last days.

The group hid for 6 weeks until pressure on Appan forced them to make other arrangements. Rivka & her family escaped to Romania & survived.

Oradea

Memories

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