The Romanian Jewish Community

         I am Oliver Lustig.

         On May 3, 1944, soon after 4 o’clock in the morning, our house was invaded by a group of Hungarian gendarmes. We were living in the commune of Soimeni, in Cluj County. I hadn’t turned 18 yet.

         Concurrently, in all the villages and communes of northern Transylvania, without exception, at the same hour, and following the same procedure, the Hungarian gendarmes knocked on the doors of all the Jewish houses with their rifle butts and seized every living Jew.

         They gave us a few hours to pack and prepare ourselves to leave. They warned us not to carry more than a total of 50 kilos per family. They took us out of our homes, put us on carts pulled by oxen and herded us to the Cluj ghetto.

         I think that being plucked from the place where I was born and being sent to the ghetto was, in fact, the first step towards death. There were three Jewish families in Soimeni: us, my grandparents, and the Schons. The following day, we had all reached the Cluj ghetto, located on the premises of the brick factory. 18,000 of us were crammed in there. This is how the ordeal began; the inferno of the incarceration had opened its gates. Of the long train of misfortunes that I encountered – from the day of my arrest to the last day of the Holocaust – the most dramatic and the most terrible scene of them all, the one that will always feel like an unhealed wound, was my arrival on the death ramp in Birkenau-Auschwitz.

         I got there on June 9, 1944. The journey from Cluj to Birkenau-Auschwitz lasted 4 days and 3 nights. It was hell. They crammed as much as 80 people in each cattle car. We were carrying everything we could take with us from the ghetto – about 3 kilos of luggage each. The car was so crowded that there was no room to lie down. The worst part is that, when someone died – either because of a heart attack or because of lack of insulin –, there wasn’t enough room to lay him down. So we got the body standing, leaned it against the wall, surrounded it with luggage, sacks, and backpacks to prevent it from falling and the journey went on. As you can imagine, there was no food or water; babies were crying all the time. Officially, each car got a single bucket of water, which was supposed to last for 4 days and 3 nights.

         The first order that was shouted when the train stopped was ‘Alle heraus!’ (‘Everybody out!’). The doors of the cars were unlocked and we all rushed to get off. Immediately after, the second order came: ‘Leave any luggage behind!’ We were supposed to leave everything we had brought along: clothes, bed sheets, tableware, the scratches of food we had used to keep the babies alive, and medicines; we had to give up everything that reminded us of home. I got off on the ramp that is known as the Death ramp in literature.

         Much to our surprise, the SS acted civilized, almost polite. They announced us we had finally reached our destination. They apologized for the terrible way in which we had traveled, pointed out that it wasn’t their fault, and reassured us: ‘You have now arrived to a labor camp where you will get enough food and you will have decent living conditions if you work well.’ We all believed them, especially because we had had a very hard time in the ghetto: the abuse and the torture we had endured were unimaginable. So, on seeing how they were welcoming us, we really thought that things would improve. The SS went on with their speech: ‘Unfortunately, we have some bad news for you. There are still 3 kilometers to go till you reach the camp where you will live and work. And it just so happens that today we don’t have enough vehicles to take you there. So will the mothers, the children under 14, the sick, and the invalids please get to the other side of the ramp? We will find the vehicles necessary to transport them somehow. The others will walk to the camp.’

         This is how families got separated for ever without knowing it; so no one yelled or cried. We were six siblings; the seventh had stayed in Cluj – well, actually not in Cluj, but in a forced labor detachment. My mother, the 14 year-old twins, Cornel and Cornelia, and 8 year-old Valentin, the youngest, moved on the other side. My father, an older sister, a younger brother and I remained where we were. This memory still hurts after 60 years and it will torment me till the day I die. I didn’t get to kiss my mother and embrace my younger siblings one last time. Of course, none of us had any idea we would never see one another again.

         The whole operation took less than an hour. The train had 50 cars and each car carried an average of 60 people; so there were about 3,000 in each train. The column that was formed on the left side – the mothers, the children, the invalids – usually represented two thirds of the whole group. Those 2,000 people started walking; they had been told they would only walk for a few hundreds of meters, until they got to the vehicles.

         I looked at my mother drifting away with her children. She held the youngest by the hand and the other two were close to her. They began marching to their deaths. There were only 1,000-1,200 steps to the gas chamber and the crematory. I watched them march until I lost sight of them. They were unsuspectingly approaching the end.

         (Edited text)