Baia Mare(Baia Mare / Siget in the project's index)2013-05-2011 min · 4 stretchesYiddish 100%
Not online: the recording is held by the project and is not on Media Collections Online, YouTube or archive.org. Everything below is a paraphrase of a machine transcript, the weaker of this site's two transcript layers — see how it was made.
Summary
Camera file (10:40), the middle of a long session recorded in Baia Mare / Siget on 20 May 2013; the index names no interviewee. An elderly man answers Kerler's questions about his forced-labour service in the Hungarian army and the fate of his parents. He then says where he was sent (Ukraine, the Don) and talks about the Kolomea rebbe, who had a congregation in his town.
Stretches
00:00–03:19
The man mentions professors at school who liked the Jews and were against antisemitism, nationalism and chauvinism. Kerler asks about his arrival in Baia Mare and his service. The man says he went from the Hungarian army into Russian captivity. The Hungarians set up a labour camp for Jews, named as Munka (?) Sargala (?), whose purpose was mostly to destroy them. He says many young Jews died there. He distinguishes this from Transnistria, to which Jews from Romania, Bessarabia and Bukovina were sent. Kerler clarifies that he is asking only about men in the army.
The man says he was taken at 21 into the Hungarian labour service. At first the Hungarians took men by a set law, but later took all Jews able to work, even up to age 50. His father was taken at 49 and shot at about 50. His mother, at 45, was killed in the ghetto in the last period of the war, and Kerler confirms the year as 1945. Kerler asks whether the father was killed by the SS, and the man says he was weak and fell.
Kerler asks when he was in Ukraine and by what route. The man says the Hungarian army went as far as Stalingrad and the Don, and the Jews were in that Hungarian zone. He names Dubno (?), a little Warsaw (?) and Lemberg, in Poland under Hungarian occupation, and says they marched to various places about sixty kilometres from Kolomea. Kerler says the team is going to Kolomea the next day.
The man talks about the Kolomea rebbe, who came to his town against the antisemites and pogroms and had a congregation there with his young men and many pious Hasidim. As a child he was sent by his grandmother with errands to the rebbe. Details of the visit (some food, money) are unclear. The rebbe placed his hands on the boy's head and gave a blessing.