very calmly, broke down a door, practically ripped it off, and were already on the street.
And then you went out?
So we went outside, it started to rain lightly, it was dark too because it was already between 8 and 9
and he started singing his Viennese songs, I walked 25, 30 meters behind him and was sure of one thing,
No one would catch me alive again.
When Lohn came to Vienna and was arrested, we had to flee from our workforce
and all of them, around 20 people, found themselves penniless in Vienna.
Without documents, without money, without a place to sleep.
Desperate.
I found a barracks for Polish foreigners in the 2nd district,
I thrust myself into the night and stole the documents
and distributed the documents to all friends so
they could continue working in Austria.
People were provided with places to sleep and with money
and our girls, who came to Austria earlier,
who worked as assistants and nurses in the Steinhof Hospital,
provided us with food cards.
Our regular place, our meeting place, was the museum café next to the opera house.
The Mozart monument served as our post office.
The notes and messages left behind were meant to be found by us
and that was our middle point in Austria.
One night, I took Kozsuk’s father with me
to sleep at the Westbahnhof train station, to the Westbahnhofcaféhaus.
Then the police came and Józef's father, Kozsuk, had no documents.
I gave him my documents and I was arrested.
They put me in a café. I was able to escape through the kitchen,
jumped into the street, was out and so avoided arrest.
But a few days later, I was arrested on the street
and taken to the Gestapo killing site for two days,
then delivered to the Promenade at Rosauer Lände in a trunk.
And as a Pole, as a Pole the entire time, I was sent to the Maria-Lanzendorf concentration camp near Vienna.
I tried a few escape attempts there. I succeeded the second time
and I went straight to Omanse-Freude in Steinhof, where I received additional documents.
When they were arrested in Vienna, Leon, the group in Schwadorf was also arrested.
The Gestapo simply picked them up. We heard about this.
And we also had to leave Haufenwart.
And we had no place to stay overnight.
And each one of us had to make our own way.
And then I discovered that in the coffee houses, the tables and chairs were arranged in pyramids
covered with tarpaulins.
And when it got dark, I sneaked over there
and to my amazement, I found a straw sack under one of these tarpaulins, under this pyramid.
And I just lay down to sleep.
Perhaps half an hour later, or perhaps an hour later, to my astonishment,
someone came and looked for their straw sack.
And then he discovered that I was already lying on it.
He ran away, he was probably more afraid of me than I was of him.
Maybe he was a Jew or perhaps he was a prisoner of war.
I still don't know to this day.
In any case, I still have some pangs of remorse today,
that I should have made room for him in his place that he prepared for these fights.
Fuck, how you have fun.
I arrived in Budapest on November 13, 1943.
After I was registered with the KEOG, the immigration police,
that took maybe two or three days, I went to Erlbrand, who was on the rescue commission,
and told him my Vienna story and said to him, it must be possible somehow,
you are the Vadad Hazala, and you have a smuggler who will bring Jews from Vienna to Hungary.
Then he told me that he heard of someone several weeks ago, but that his contact person had disappeared,
he didn't know what had happened to him. And I was upset because our people, I knew,
that they were on the streets because they had all fled from their jobs.
They were afraid that someone had betrayed them, perhaps me or someone else among those
who were arrested with me. And it was on November, November 13th that I arrived.
And I almost scolded them saying that it was outrageous that the rescue commission
was without a contact person in Vienna for six weeks or seven or eight weeks.
Then he said, don't turn to me. And do you think you can do it?
I said, yes, I can do it. He said, fine, then go ahead.
I traveled down to Sopron and I made contact.
I made contact within two or three days.
And after three days, the first group of my people that I had sent to Vienna,
had been sent to Austria, crossed the border.
And I brought them to Budapest by train from Sopron.
I once brought a girl with me who was not from my group, but belonged to Joel Brandt's party.
Because I realized that there might be suspicion if I only brought my group.
And from somewhere, who knows where.
I came back after about five days as a chopper and went to Joel Brandt.
He asked me, well Leo, have you achieved anything?
And I said yes. Where are the people?
So I let four of my people come in, or five, I can't remember exactly.
They came in and he wasn't really convinced that everything was OK.
Then I said, but I will put your mind at ease and I called in the girl from his party that he was looking for.
And I said, you have your girl here, so you can see what this is.
And from then on, because I had managed it so quickly, I think,
I became a member of the youth rescue committee.
There was a rescue committee made up of older people and then there was a rescue committee made up of younger people.
Then I became a member of this rescue committee and we started working.
In March 1944, I arrived from Budapest via Romania, Bulgaria and Turkey in what was then Palestine.
And I was supposed to report on what was going on in Poland.
And that there is still a group of people from Poland there in Budapest and the Jewish population in Budapest and all that could happen.
I was brought before the German Agency and before Father Poel von Histadrut and reported what was going on in Poland, what Auschwitz was, what it meant to transport people.
And I said that this is what will happen in Hungary and it is high time to get the people out of there or to help them.
Or in some way, do everything possible to protect, to help the rest of the Jewish population that is still in Europe.
And no one believed me about what was going on in Poland.
I must also say that the press in Israel was not at all oriented toward this.
There was a very short report of my stories.
A very, very short report and the people, when I personally went to tell the people of Vada Hazala what was going on, I was told that I was telling stories, I was making things up.
Such things were impossible.
And at the Jewish Agency, they asked me how it was possible that I simply left without resisting?
And then I told them that we had resisted.
That it wasn't just Warsaw, that there was resistance in all sorts of positions, in all sorts of ghettos, about which they knew nothing.
And I told them why, in what way, with what effort and with what offers we were able to buy the revolvers, the pistols.
And what it all cost, of which they had no idea, and needed nothing.
At nightfall, the smuggler...
met us, gave us instructions to walk behind him, it was dark.
Nevertheless, we did not feel afraid, we knew that we were getting closer to freedom with every step.
After ten or twelve kilometers through a hilly forest, he stopped us and told
us that we were already in Hungary and instructed us to follow behind him single file,
to walk behind at a distance of 50 or 80 meters,
that it wouldn't be noticed that he had brought us to the village.
He took us into his own apartment, which was on the outskirts of the village,
and all eight of us were in his apartment.
Maybe an hour or two later, there was suddenly a knock on the door, it was the police.
Presumably someone reported us and we were arrested in the smuggler's apartment.
After the arrest, we were taken to the prison in Sopron.
We had a visit from a lawyer after a day or two.
The lawyer got us Leon Blatt.
Up till then, we had lied about being Jews.
He told us to admit that we were Jews.
All other aspects of suspicion, like espionage
or anything else, were dropped .
And we actually got two weeks in prison.
It was March 5, 1944.
We were supposed to be freed on March 19th.
And to our horror, on the night of March 19,
we heard German commands in the prison.
The Germans had occupied Hungary.
The courtyard was already full when we arrived here from Sopron.
There were hundreds, perhaps thousands of Jews standing there.
The courtyard was even larger then than it is today because buildings have been added in the meantime.
And we knew exactly what people being constantly picked up by trucks meant.
The people were immediately transported to the train station.
The transports went directly to the crematorium in Auschwitz.
The only solution we found at that moment was to protest that we were not considered as Jews here.
We said the greatest ability is to keep ourselves together with the Jews and we protested.
And then we actually got them to put us up there with the normal criminals.
And that saved our lives.
One day, an officer came to our cell and asked for a Lakatos.
Lakatos was a Hungarian plumber.
We didn't know what to do.
In any case, Karol and I volunteered.
We got a toolbox.
And in the toolbox, there was a large toilet brush, a few screwdrivers and a hammer.
We immediately guessed what they wanted to do with it.
But the important thing was that we also got an armband.
And with this armband, we were able to walk freely throughout the prison.
This enabled us to always be informed of the latest news
because there wasn't a day on which no new prisoners arrived.
There were many Poles, and of course Jews on Aryan papers,
who brought us the latest news about what was happening outside.
The other advantage was that we knew when the people, the guys who worked in the kitchen,
were walking down the stairs with a huge basket of bread on their backs.
We positioned ourselves accordingly and as they passed by, we reached in and stole a piece of bread.
And that's what kept us alive.
It was clear that we knew that it was only a postponement,
that our papers stating that we were Jews would arrive one day
since we confessed at the border in Sopron that we were Jews
in order not to be considered saboteurs or spies.
And that was the danger we faced.
And in fact, we were sent away after the papers arrived.
We received the exact plans for the prison on Rombachstrasse and we
decided to free you, Karol and the seven other people.
We sent a package of food to you in prison and there
was a note in the jam telling you what to do, what preparations to make and
that we were ready.