In November 1944, I was taken to Dachau with a group of political prisoners from Hungary by an SS unit stationed in the fortress of Komarom. Here, the Hungarian authorities delivered us and left us to the mercy of their allies. Instead of the fixed daily routine of the Hungarian prisons, we did not know what awaited us here in the future.
Born on September 18, 1920 in Fuilet, at the age of five, he attended the public school from which, his whole life, he kept a very good memory of his teacher who thought children "democracy, the republic, freedom, the sense of honor, the homeland, the respect for the human being and the welfare of others
December 13, 2016 at the Dachau memorial site.
I am honored that, as a Jewish, Hungarian citizen and a survivor of the Holocaust, at the request of the management of the Dachau concentration camp memorial site, I may be present at this memorial conversation and report to you that in the summer of 1944, within 56 days, in 149 trains, 465,000 people of Jewish faith or of Jewish origin were deported from Hungary, the majority of them to Auschwitz-Birkenau and other extermination camps, and those left alive to other concentration camps.
Johan Kloostra at the front in the Spanish Civil War
Vladimir Feierabend
Vladimir Feierabend is born on 7 July , 1924 in Prague, and is the younger son of Karel and Marie Feierabend. He is not yet 15 years old when Nazi Germany occupies Czechoslovakia on March 15, 1939, which then becomes the "Protectorate of the Reich of Bohemia and Moravia". Waves of terror, arrests and deportation hit the people.
The protectorate Böhmen and Mähren was a grim time for our family. Uncle Lada became a member of the Czechoslovakian government as a minister of agriculture. Also, he had joined the underground against Nazism, a movement called “Political Headquarters”. At the beginning of the year 1940 he was warned by Prime Minister Gen. Elias that his involvement in this movement was revealed and his life was in danger. With the help of Czech and Slovak patriots he managed to escape under dramatic circumstances which he described in detail in his memoirs. He travelled eastwards through the Balkan, then to France and eventually he arrived in England where he became a member of the Czech government in exile. This had consequences for our part of the family. The Gestapo looked for uncle Lade at our flat and we did not know whether the situation would turn against us.
