Hanging In as Slave Laborers

We were divided into two groups. Ours became the forced slave laborers of the twentieth century. The other group, however, was the unlucky one. It consisted of people unfit to work, either because of age or poor health, but mainly young mothers who had more than two babies with them. Empty boxcars stood ready to ship these miserable saints without delay to the gas chambers of Auschwitz. There, the innocent, defenseless human cargo perished within minutes - their tormented souls returned to their Creator, their remains herded to the crematorium and burned to ashes. The pure souls parted from the bodies through the crematorium chimney in the form of dark gray smoke, on their way to the heavenly tribunal.

Our group boarded boxcars at the same time as the less fortunate group. With deep pain, I can still recall seeing a former neighbor of ours, Mrs. Stern - along with her four young children - board the Auschwitz-bound boxcars. She saw no one except for her young ones. Her eyes reflected the oncoming death. After the war, she and her children never came back, like so many others from our home town, and from so many other cities and countries.

Our transport got moving, stopping after a while at a small Austrian town. Here, each of us received a hot meal consisting of mashed potatoes and spinach, compliments of the local mayor. It was a very nice gesture.

Later we arrived in Vienna, where we left the boxcars and walked through some of the city's long streets, our packs on our backs and in our hands. As usual, armed guards escorted us. I recall being taken over by a terrible sense of humiliation when masses of civilians peered at our column. Looking back, it was they who should have felt the shame, and not me.

I did not feel the time passing. We boarded regular trains and arrived at our destination Friday morning. It was the railroad station of Ober Hollabrun. The gendarmes escorted us to a red-faced landowner in his fifties. His handsome helper, a Russian prisoner of war named Stefan, had dark hair and a white face. We walked not too far to a farm between the towns of Ober Hollabrun and Ober Fellabrun, as a horse cart carried our packs.

Along the road stood a simple white house consisting of a small kitchen with a built-in-stove, and a bigger living room. Straw mattresses and rugs covered the bare earth floor. This house served as sleeping quarters for three families with twenty-one souls, who received some light blankets. The fourth family, my aunt and her four children, occupied a very narrow storeroom.

Our first day of work turned out to be our Holy Sabbath Day. Sure enough, a sad beginning. Sigfried Sedlar, the farm owner, paid the Nazi authorities some amount in order to use us, but we received no payment, only a meager food supply. We performed strenuous farm work from sunrise to sunset for the duration of our stay, all summer and fall. Sunday became our day of rest. Our captors treated us inhumanely, hitting us on any special occasion they found.

We kept track of our holy days, the Jewish New Year and Yom Kippur. The landowner, Sigfried Sedlar, permitted us to celebrate them. We prayed to the Almighty even more fervently than ever, hoping to be rescued soon - to be free human beings with all our loved ones.

© David Muskal, 2001