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National Holocaust Remembrance Day. I would like to tell you about my family. My grandparents had eleven children. There was six boys and five girls. My grandfather died in 1922 due to exposure to chemicals in WWI. At that time the oldest girl was sent to America to make money and help support the family back in Hungary. She worked here and got married and started a family. In the meantime she also helped support her mother and brothers and sisters back in Hungary.
In 1944 the Germans started rounding up all the Jews in Hungary for the final solution. All the sisters were taken with their families to concentration camps where they were murdered. Two of my 1st cousins were taken from Auschwitz concentration camp and sent to a munitions factory as slave labor. Both girls came home and married and started families. The rest of their family was gone.
Now some of the brothers had married and their families were sent to a concentration camp, never to return. My father, along with the other brothers, were sent to slave labor camps.
1945 with the war over, the brothers came home minus their families. Some of them made it home. Eyewitnesses reported that two of the brothers were burned alive. The Hungarians were just as bad as the Germans. The brothers who did make it back remarried and started new lives.
After coming home, my father met my mother who during the war was at Stutthof concentration camp. She was ill, but still wanted children. They were married and had two sons. Unfortunately, due to her health, she didn't live long. She passed away at 30 when I was six years old and my brother was five. Later my father remarried, the woman who became my stepmother. She had also been in Auschwitz. I still remember the "A" and numbers tattooed on her arm. The doctors said that being in a concentration camp was too much and she had to be institutionalized.
I done a lot of research on my family history and have gotten a lot of my information from THE CENTRAL DATABASE OF SHOAH VICTIMS NAMES run by YAD AVSHEM. I gave up my research after finding the names of my three year old cousins. That was just too much...
There is a lot more to my story, but I will stop here.
Eugene Lang
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