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BILL BENSON:
Good afternoon and welcome to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. My name is Bill Benson and I am the host of the Museum’s public program, First Person. Thank you for joining us. This is our eleventh year of the First Person program. Our first person today is Mr. Steve Fenves whom we shall meet shortly.
This 2010 season of First Person is made possible through the generosity of the Louis and Dora Smith Foundation to whom we are grateful for again sponsoring First Person.
First Person is a series of weekly conversations with survivors of the Holocaust who share with us their firsthand accounts of their experience during the Holocaust. Each guest serves as a volunteer here at the Museum. With few exceptions we will have a First Person program each Wednesday through August and we will have First Person programs on Tuesdays in April through July. The Museum's web site, www.ushmm.org provides a list of upcoming First Person guests.
Excerpts from our First Person programs are available as podcasts on the Museum’s website. They are also available through iTunes. Steven’s podcast for his presentation today will be available on the website in the next few weeks.
Steve Fenves will share with us his first person account of his experience during the Holocaust and as a survivor for about 45 minutes. If time allows we will have an opportunity for you to ask Steve a few questions. We ask that you stay in your seats during our one hour program that way we minimize any disruptions for him as he speaks.
If you have a pass to the Permanent Exhibition this afternoon, please note that it’s good for the time on your pass but it’s also good for any time after that.
The Holocaust was the state-sponsored, systematic persecution and annihilation of European Jewry by Nazi Germany and its collaborators between 1933 and 1945. Jews were the primary victims–six million were murdered. Roma and Sinti or Gypsies, people with mental and physical disabilities, and Poles were also targeted for destruction or decimation for racial, ethnic, or national reasons. Millions more, including homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Soviet Prisoners of war, and political dissidents also suffered grievous oppression and death under Nazi Germany
The life stories of Holocaust survivors transcend the decades. What you are about to hear from Steve is one individuals account of the Holocaust. We have prepared a brief slide presentation to help with his introduction and we begin with a studio portrait taken in 1940 or 1941 of Steve and his sister Estera. Steve was born June 6, 1931 in Subotica, Yugoslavia. The arrow on this map of Yugoslavia in 1933 points to Subotica. Steve's father Louis was the manager of the printing plant of a Hungarian language daily newspaper and would later become the editor of that same newspaper. His mother, Claire, was a graphic artist. In this photo we see Louis and Claire at a horse race in Subotica in the 1920s. Here we see Steve and his family on an outing to a farm in the summer of 1940. In 1941 Germany attacked Yugoslavia and its ally, Hungary, occupied Steve's town. Life changed immediately for Steve and his family. Jews in Subotica were subjected to Hungarian racial laws, which were modeled after those in Germany. From September 1940-May 1944 Steve's family lived in one corner of their apartment.
In May 1944, Germany occupied Hungary (and Hungarian occupied territories like Subotica). Soon after Steve's father was deported to Auschwitz, while the rest of the family was forced into a ghetto in Subotica. At the end of June 1944 Steve and his family that remained in the ghetto were sent to another ghetto and sent then to Auschwitz. Here we see an aerial reconnaissance photo of Auschwitz Birkenau, taken in September 1944 by the U.S. Air Force. The arrow points to the barrack that Steve was in from June-October 1944.
In October 1944, Steve was sent to another camp at Niederorschel. On April 1, 1945, about six months later Steve was sent on a death march to the Buchenwald concentration camp. He was liberated by the Americans on April 11. Steven was then placed in a field hospital established at Buchenwald, we see that field hospital in this photo. Four months later Steve returned to Subotica and was reunited with his father and sister, but his father died less than 6 months after returning to Subotica. Steve's mother perished at Auschwitz. Steve and his sister immigrated to the US in 1950 and we close our slide presentation with this contemporary photo of Steve.
Steve was drafted in United States army in 1953. After his discharge he enrolled at the Champagne-Urbana campus of the University of Illinois where he would eventually earn his Ph.D. in Civil Engineering and then began a 42 year academic career in the computing field at the University of Illinois and then later at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. After retiring from Carnegie Mellon in 1999, Steve and his wife Norma, whom he married in 1955, moved to the Washington D.C. area where he accepted a position at the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
Steve and Norma have 4 children. Gregory is Dean of the Engineering school at the University of Texas at Austin, Carol is director of Contracts for the New York State Department of Environmental Protection, Peter is a professor of Humanities at Northwestern, and their youngest Laura is a Human Resources Consultant here in the Washington D.C. area. Steve and Norma have 7 [grand]children between the ages of 23 and 3. Steve first began talking about his Holocaust experience in the 1970s when he became the founding president of a Holocaust survivors organization in Pittsburgh.
Upon his retirement from the National Institute of Standards and Technology, this past December Steve became active with this Museum. In addition to participating today in the First Person program, he also volunteers in the Museum’s Visitor Services. I’m pleased to let you know that his wife Norma is with us here today, as is his granddaughter Molly who just graduated from college in the last couple of weeks and Norma and Molly if you wouldn’t mind raising your hands so folks know you’re here. [Applause]. And with that I’d like to ask you to join me in welcoming our first person Mr. Steven Fenves. [Applause]
STEVEN FENVES:
All the years I was teaching I would have liked to have an assistant like JoAnna to usher people into, into rows rather than letting the students sit in the back rows.
BILL BENSON:
Very orderly, absolutely. Steve, thank you so much for joining us today and for your willingness to be our first person. We have such a short amount of time and so much to cover so we should begin, I think, right away.
Steve you were nearly ten years old when the part of Yugoslavia where you lived was occupied by Hungary and your family’s life would be forever changed. But before we turn to that time why don’t we begin with you telling us a bit about your first ten years. About yourself, your family, and your community.
STEVEN FENVES:
Alright, putting the history clock back just twelve years, Yugoslavia was formed in 1919 and the portion where I was born was part of Hungary until the Versailles Treaty, so it was a very young country and that particular region the majority of the population was Hungarian. My uncle was a, started as a newspaper man, became the editor of a local paper before World War I. Bought the paper and after the area was turned over to Yugoslavia, he was the editor of the largest Hungarian daily outside of Hungary proper.
My father worked to support him, even in his college years and then became manager of the plant. When my uncle died in 1935, my father became the editor. We lived very comfortable upper middle class life, large apartment in the same building where the printing plant and publishing house was. We had a cook, a maid, a governess, a chauffer. Before you go “oh la la” about all of this luxury, you have to remember that Yugoslavia was a dirt poor country, and if you could afford to own a car, you could certainly afford to support another family by hiring a chauffeur. One of my classmates father drove his own car, and everyone considered him terribly, terribly selfish. So I had a very comfortable life. From age three on I had a German speaking governess because in my parent’s social milieu that was considered requirement.
BILL BENSON
And a governess was like a Nanny?
STEVEN FENVES:
Uh, a live in…
BILL BENSON:
Housekeeper, nanny?
STEVEN FENVES:
No, no housekeeping duties, just, just…
BILL BENSON:
Take care of the kids.
STEVEN FENVES:
Just taking care of the kids, yeah. Terrible lady… Wow. I started school, and the school was, they, classes were in Serbian, at home we spoke Hungarian, with the governess we spoke German. We belonged to the reform congregation, ultra-reform by European standards, close to ultra-orthodox by American, current American standards. Women sat separately on the upper floor, men wore top hats, entire service in Hebrew, etc.
We went to school, Hebrew… religious school three afternoons a week. After school, and since school was five and a half days a week, there was a youth service at one o’clock on Saturday afternoon. Time was very clearly called, the service had to be exactly one hour long because at two o’clock the matinees in all three movie houses in the city opened and we rushed as a body out of the chapel into the street to be there for the matinees.
BILL BENSON:
Steve, tell us a little bit about your mother. We mentioned in the slide presentation that she was a graphic artist.
STEVEN FENVES:
My mother came from much… better established family than my father, her father was a lawyer, there were professors, doctor, industrialists in her family. She, after high school she went to Budapest at the University of Fine Arts, she has…had a degree as a graphic artist and she travelled quite a bit in Europe-Germany, France, Italy and did a lot of sketching of which just the small part has survived.
BILL BENSON:
I had the privilege of seeing those sketches and their just magnificent in Steve and Norma’s home. Your father as editor of the newspaper of course was a leader in the community, tell us a little bit about the newspaper itself.
STEVEN FENVES:
I don’t think the paper was very distinguished before World War I. It was just another local newspaper. But after World War I, it took several years for the Serbian authorities to reauthorize publications in any language other than Serb or Croatian and the paper was re-opened. The paper was censored everyday. I remember going with my father to the city hall. A judge was waiting for him, the tear sheets of the paper were presented to him. He read it over, “x-ed” out anything he didn’t like and then my father had to go back to the plant and the workmen had to use chisels to “x” that out of the lead plates already mounted on the rotary presses.
BILL BENSON:
Not like doing it with a computer today.
STEVEN FENVES:
The paper became considerably left-leaning, in the classical European social democrat tradition. Because the Hungarian regime in many respects pre-dated the Germans and lot of leftist journalists were leaving the country. The first place for them to stop, five kilometers from the border, was Subotica. And so many of them worked for my father, many of them came west. When my sister and I came to the States in 1950, there were four Hungarian dailies in North America and one Hungarian monthly literary magazine. Three of the five editors had worked for my father.
BILL BENSON:
Which is a remarkable statement about how important that newspaper was. Let me ask you just a couple more questions about those early years before you move on Steve, and one of them is you were, as many youngsters were at that time, a stamp collector, but you also collected automobile emblems. Tell us about that.
STEVEN FENVES:
Yeah, I was fascinated by cars and part of the print-making plant was a book binding shop, so I got the book binding shop to bind a journal-like book and on separate pages I would carefully draw the emblem of every foreign car that I encountered. And that, yes, that was one of my…
BILL BENSON:
Quite a hobby
STEVEN FENVES:
…great fashions, yes.
BILL BENSON:
And you also told me that I think Wednesday afternoons governesses and maids got the afternoon off and that was a time for mischief for kids.
STEVEN FENVES:
Yeah, we were seven, uh grandchildren on my paternal grandmother had seven grandchildren. One lived in Budapest, he seldom appeared, by the six of us were deposited by governesses and maids at my grandmother’s, sort of a country house and we did terrible things. The one that I mentioned to you, one day… I was the youngest of the seven, so whatever the big guys…
BILL BENSON:
You were the innocent.
STEVEN FENVES:
… I was the one to do it. But, as you can imagine in a poor country like that, how much people present…, depend on preserves. Sauerkraut, tomato paste, etc, etc, jams, etc. We went in my grandmother’s pantry, soaked off all the labels from all the jars, changed the labels, and put them back on other jars. Our grandmother thought that was fantastic.
BILL BENSON:
Steve you had at least one relative at that time in the United States didn’t you?
STEVEN FENVES:
Yes, my maternal uncle, my mother’s only sibling, was a…I think he was a resident in Budapest in a hospital when he met this lady from the States who’s parents were visiting relatives. And he followed her to the States and he had a practice in on Central Park West. But then contracted MS and by the time we came he was terminally ill.
BILL BENSON:
But he would be important motivation for you to get here…
STEVEN FENVES:
Yes, yes. Definitely.
BILL BENSON:
Steve, of course what you had described as a good life, those early ten years, all of that would change dramatically beginning in 1941 when Germany invaded Yugoslavia and their ally Hungary occupied the part of Yugoslavia where you lived. From the very first day of their occupation, your family and your community were immediately subjected to profound upheaval. What happened once the Hungarians came in?
STEVEN FENVES:
The day of the occupation, a Hungarian officer at withdrawn pistol ejected my father from his office. And the plant and the paper instantly nationalized. A couple years later there was a trial that justified this take over, which didn’t amount to much. That so, my father’s livelihood disappeared.
A portion of the house were the requisitions for quartering troops. That turned out to be not terribly onerous at all because there were three princes, three cavalry officers stationed there. It was their retreat off base. They didn’t sleep there every night.
BILL BENSON:
But requisitions meaning, the soldiers would be put into private homes.
STEVEN FENVES:
Yes, Yes. And I mean these were gentlemen of the, well one, one of them was a Count Esterházy. [Haydn], the composer [Haydn], had the choice of either going to London to play for the British king or to go to the Esterházy estate to play for the Esterházy Counts and chose the Esterházy. Gentlemen… “Madame we understand that you lost your maid,” because we had to let all your servants go, uh … “our butler is available to assist Madame.” So there was this sight of my mother going to the market place and a Hungarian Sergeant carrying her basket behind her.
BILL BENSON:
But it could have easily been three thugs that were put up in your home?
STEVEN FENVES:
Yeah, right, right yeah, later we had some of those. To me the biggest change was, that summer, your introduction said Hungary mimicked German laws, in some ways predated them. Hungary in the ‘20s, early ’20s introduced the law called numerus clausus which restricted the entry of Jews into educational institutions to the percentage of the total population. So, out of 30 or 40 kids in my fourth grade class, we were taken… boys in that class, we had to take a competitive exam to, and… seven of us were selected to be admitted.
BILL BENSON:
So even if every one of you aced the exams, only a certain percentage could go?
STEVEN FENVES:
Right, right yeah. So my father found something to do that first summer because he coached me for the exam. And I was one of them to pass… it really didn’t make much difference because we were sitting in the back row, there was no point in raising your hand–the teacher never recognized you. So you just sat there in silence.
BILL BENSON:
So like a non-person.
STEVEN FENVES:
Right, totally like a non-person.
BILL BENSON:
Was your sister able to go, to continue school?
STEVEN FENVES
No. Uh, yes yes she did. But not to the public women’s academic high school but to a… a high school run by an order of Catholic nuns. In Hungary both, I don’t remember the name of the orders, but the nuns and a, priestly order called the Piarists, who were related to the Jesuits but I don’t exactly know, they maintained their schools and they threw out the regime–refused to honor the numerus clausus law.
BILL BENSON:
One of the laws that was imposed, and you alluded to it a minute ago when you said you had to let the maid go. In reality, they could no longer work for Jews right? Non-Jews could no longer work for Jews.
STEVEN FENVES:
Yeah, yeah. That was the first week, non-Jews could not work for Jews.
BILL BENSON:
So immediately your governess and maid were all gone.
STEVEN FENVES:
Oh our governess, our governess was a German national and she bolted the morning of the takeover.
BILL BENSON:
With your father having lost his job immediately, how was the family able to make ends meat?
STEVEN FENVES:
It was a terrible hardship. My mother did handiwork knitting, and crocheting, and weaving. And my father helped out, his health deteriorated very rapidly and he was very tough… it was toughest on him from all of us.
BILL BENSON:
At the time, you told me that you were able to keep up somewhat, what was happening in the rest of Europe because of course war had begun in September of 1939 with the invasion of Poland.
STEVEN FENVES:
Yep. We, yeah. I mean there were weekly orders of giving up something. One week it was radios, second week it was toasters. Whatever, there were always things being confiscated. But there were radios around, particularly BBC, European broadcasts, those were followed quite closely.
BILL BENSON:
But these were clandestine radios?
STEVEN FENVES:
Yes, yes.
BILL BENSON:
You would live under these circumstances for several years as a matter of fact. But, eventually of course, Hungary was on the edge of capitulating to the Allies and at that point Germany took action and stepped in and invaded your country and your community and everything changed, even far worse than you’d experienced up to that point. Tell us about when the Germans came.
STEVEN FENVES:
Well unlike the Hungarians coming in with soldiers on horseback, and all the hoopla, I don’t remember seeing the Germans come in. It was just, one day it was…the occupation was there. My father and most of the intellectuals were rounded up in the first 48 hours-taken to a make-shift camp in a small village that showed up on your map. And then they were deported to Auschwitz a couple weeks later.
We…yeah, let me back up just a couple months. School was out, I think in April and I started working as a mechanic in a machine shop of a former employee of my fathers. Eventually we were ordered out of the…to vacate the premises and move into a row of dilapidated houses along the railroad yard.
BILL BENSON:
This was after your father was taken?
STEVEN FENVES:
A few weeks after my father was taken. So, like every other Jewish mother, my mother packed way too much stuff. Anyhow, she didn’t know what was forthcoming…so how to transport that? Well, working as a mechanic one day I helped a lady who had a little, coach business, so I ran over to her and she lent us a driver with a horse and buggy and transported us there. So we were deposited, the three of us, plus my maternal grandmother, in this one room. Cramped as it was, and even more cramped with all the goodies that my mother decided to bring with her. Terrible conditions-no sanitation, no medical attention, very poor conditions. I was allowed out of the camp, out of the ghetto because I worked for this machine shop that did some military business. So it, on June 6, 1944 I heard of the Normandy invasion, in the machine shop and I believe I was the first one who came back to the camp, to the ghetto to report that the invasion had happened.
BILL BENSON:
What was the reaction to that news? Was it a sense that that things were going to change for the better?
STEVEN FENVES:
Oh yeah, yeah. An enormous…I mean a suppressed jubilation because the guards were always on the outside. But, yeah, hope went up but then a few days, few days later all of the hope was squashed when we were ordered to leave and lined up and taken in railroad cars to a small village outside Subotica which had been converted into a concentration…a ghetto concentrating the people from the entire region.
BILL BENSON:
Steve before you continue with that, let me go back just a little bit. You told me that the day that you had to leave your home to go into the ghetto was one of the grimmest days of your life.
STEVEN FENVES:
Yep. We lived on the second floor and word was out, I don’t know how the word got out, but the word was out and people were lined up all along the stairway waiting to ransack the apartment, cursing us, yelling at us, spitting at us as we were leaving.
BILL BENSON:
These were people who had been your neighbors…
STEVEN FENVES:
People, yeah. People….yeah. Yeah, that’s very hard.
BILL BENSON:
And there was one exception to that.
STEVEN FENVES:
Yeah. The one exception was our cook whom we had let go three years earlier. She was there, she went in the apartment, she took, my mother’s recipe book, a diary that our mother kept two and a half years after my sister’s birth and less than six months after my birth, which is normal for second children, but in addition a portfolio of as many of her drawings and etchings that she could gather. And she took that and after the war she returned them to us.
BILL BENSON:
And that’s why you have the sketches hanging on your wall today.
STEVEN FENVES:
Yep, yep.
BILL BENSON:
So you were starting to tell us now you were shipped and placed in another one, in another community
STEVEN FENVES:
Yep, that was just three or four days…really horrible conditions. I think we were, our family was housed in a chicken coop. The only thing I remember about that is that one, a small group of dignitaries I would say were put on a separate shipment that eventually constituted, was part of the Kastner train that went to Switzerland-fifteen hundred some people. There were negotiations trading lives for trucks with the Germans, etc. Nothing of that magnitude…
BILL BENSON:
But they had come out of the place where you were?
STEVEN FENVES:
Maybe sixty people came out of there, yep.
BILL BENSON:
From there, Steve you were sent to Auschwitz.
STEVEN FENVES:
From there we were sent to Auschwitz. One thing both the two deportations, from Subotica to Bácsalmás, from Bácsalmás to Auschwitz, I do not recall seeing a single German SS or any other German. My recollection is that it was entirely done by the Hungarian gendarmerie, you’d recognize them. They wore black bowler hats with the plume, very vivid uniforms.
I only remember Hungarian gendarmes doing the entire deportation. Putting, pressing us in the cars, locking, locking the doors… and I have no idea how many they took. But there was no food, no drink, no place to relieve yourself, people dying, people going mad. My grandmother totally, totally lost her mind. And then we were in Auschwitz… an enormous, the first thing that hits you is the stench. I mean, that’s still in my nose. So we were all ordered out, lined up, my grandmother had a prosthesis on her foot. She was sitting on a big mountain of suitcases waving to us. And I can remember her yelling, telling us “look, I’m well, I’m well.” Something like that. And then the selection that a lot of people have described. Almost every survivor that I have met specifically remembers…
BILL BENSON:
Mengele
STEVEN FENVES:
…Doctor Mengele. I don’t. I don’t know who it was. It was an SS officer in white gloves, that’s all I remember. My mother and sister in one line and I in the other line and then during the selection…there were quite a few young people my age who survived that selection. We were, stripped shorn, disinfected, deloused-hours and hours-before we were marched double time into a camp. And in fact we were kept separate and we were put into the barrack that you showed, which must have had about a thousand kids my age.
BILL BENSON:
In the one barrack?
STEVEN FENVES:
In the one barrack.
BILL BENSON:
You were thirteen years old?
STEVEN FENVES:
I was thirteen years old.
BILL BENSON:
And it’s a wonder that you were selected to survive at the age, and in fact you told me that you in fact had lied about your age.
STEVEN FENVES:
That came later…trying to get out, yeah. No as I said there were a lot of us, I mean I remember quite a few of my classmates who were there.
BILL BENSON:
Thirteen year olds?
STEVEN FENVES:
Yeah. But, the treatment was not the same, anyhow camp conditions-horrendous. Soup, ladled out once a day until you could acquire a utensil it was ladled into your hands. A run to the latrine once a day. You learned fast, an older inmate told us to pick up a pebble on the way to the latrines so we have something to wipe ourselves. [A] lot of people have said that young people survived more easily than older people because they had not acquired the niceties of civilization that older people had acquired.
Anyway, I was in that barrack the Kapos, the prisoner overseers, were two German criminals with red triangles and one of them was looking for an interpreter. I spoke a lot better German than he did and so he picked me as an interpreter. As a result I had the privilege of scraping out the bottom of the big pot that the soup came in, so a minimal increment in food. But I got to learn a little bit more about the camp. And then, you can look up the date in August somewhere, a quarter of that camp was occupied by Gypsy families, and then…in one night…they were all wiped out.
BILL BENSON:
And you were there for that?
STEVEN FENVES:
And I was there–I mean we heard it. Shoutings, shooting. We all started singing to…to get away from the noise. The following morning, since I could go to the locked gate of the barrack I had peeked out, inmates were cleaning out the rubble and white washing the barracks and they were supervised by Kapos, by overseers with red triangles-political prisoners. And that day, or next day I’m not sure when, one of them came over and said he needed a interpreter who spoke Polish, Hungarian, and German.
Well you learn a lot of things very fast in a camp and Polish and Serbian are not that different, so I volunteered. And I became an interpreter, and that of course, that really changed everything because that was the resistance organization. People determined to get out, people having the means to get out. Many of them violently antisemitic but…that didn’t matter.
BILL BENSON:
But it was actually a resistance movement right inside Auschwitz.
STEVEN FENVES:
Yes, very much so. We had contact with the brigades that were working on the outskirts past the last fence and the Polish resistance was never very far from there. We could smuggle out lists of names, we could have contact with the underground. A good part…well let me first talk about the general activity. This entire set of barracks that you saw on the map, that was nothing but a huge holding pound of people…that might be selected for labor.
Everyday there were line-ups, appell, German civilians or military would come in the camp selecting workers for their factories, quarries, cement plants, railroad sites, whatever and needed workers for. And you know that SS rented out these prisoners to the German industry. I, as an interpreter, very often interpreted as the German foreman went out questioning people what their skills were etc, etc. Sometimes I had the privilege of picking up, if the camp was very busy I was sent to the guard post to meet the incoming German civilians and escort them back out.
Okay so that was the official duty, unofficial duty was everything else. The railroad tracks for the new prisoners, new trains brought in were directly behind us. Whenever we could we had a crew out there sweeping the gravel behind the last barrack. And when the time was right and the guards were looking the other way the inmates cleaning the trains would whistle and cans of sardine, food, valuables, whatever were flying over the electrified fence for our people to pick up to use on the black market. Black market bought everything up that was governed by the black market-German enlisted men could be corrupted very easily. A gold watch was the standard unit of currency. And among other things we had a roof repair unit.
BILL BENSON:
Roof repair?
STEVEN FENVES:
Yeah I mean these wooden barracks with tar paper roofs, we had a cart with a roll, a barrel of pitch and some rolls of paper and we went from compound to compound ostensibly repairing roofs. In the meantime, passing information, passing black market goods. The male Kapos visiting their girlfriends who were female Kapos in the German barracks etc, etc. Among other things I met my sister in one of the women’s compounds and then later…
BILL BENSON:
Up to that point did you know that she was alive?
STEVEN FENVES:
Nope, nope, nope. She told me that our mother had died very early, in the first few days. So, I was the smallest, the youngest in the unit and the thin… my sister’s memory is that I was this fat [gasps] which… probably in relative terms I was. But I always, I often had half a dozen gold watches trapped on my thigh, frisking from compound to compound I was never caught. So that situation was going on August, September, October and then the camp was emptying out.
Two of the crematoria were blown up, the uprising in a crematoria took place, and so the Polish Kapos, overseers, decided to smuggle me out. They had promised that they would keep me for the duration, but then even though I objected they said I had to get out. So they picked a transport that appeared to be safe, you could never tell because sometimes we knew that sometimes a bona fide, sometimes selections that looked bona fide were carried out only the train returned and everybody gassed as they came off the train.
BILL BENSON:
So they would appear to send a group on a train out for work and then just bring them right back and…
STEVEN FENVES:
Right. So they decided this one transport was safe, they smuggled me in the line, I got tattoo. At that time in Auschwitz in ’44 you were not tattooed when you came in you were only tattooed if you managed to be sent out. And in the line of other inmates handing bundles of clothes, one of the Kapos handled me a bundle of considerably better clothes than what was handed out. So we got in the train and after some hesitation it left and three days later it pulled up to this little railroad station that said Niederorschel.
BILL BENSON:
And so you had a very rough beginning there, tell us about it.
STEVEN FENVES:
Yeah. As soon as we got off the train and we were lined up there was a speech by the SS officer you know the usual stuff, all the reasons why you could get shot or hung. And the German foreman spoke and then he looked down the line and he recognized me and he walked up to me and said “What are you doing here? I didn’t select you.” I had been interpreter for him in Auschwitz. Well the Polish overseers drilled me into lot of things including all this using my sister’s birth date so that if they asked my age I would get tripped up, but this was not a…
BILL BENSON:
I’m going to stop you for a minute Steve. You had been using your sister’s birth date which would have made you two years older officially?
STEVEN FENVES:
Two years older, yep. Yes. All of the official reports, I now have the copy of the shipping order, shipping manifest from Auschwitz to Niederorschel with all the names on it and the Auschwitz registration and the Buchenwald registration, every where I’m listed with the birth date of April 16, 1929. So he confronts me, “what are you doing here?” And I thought for a minute and I said, “well with this many new prisoners they decided that you need another interpreter,” and I was sent along as an interpreter.”
BILL BENSON:
Again, thirteen years of age, thinking on your feet like that.
STEVEN FENVES:
So that wasn’t very hard. What was very hard was that we were ushered in, tables, benches, hot soup, and relatively fresh bread which was a novelty–they fed us and I dipped my soup and my spoon in the soup. Two of the inmates sat on either side of me very close, very tightly and in a very threatening order and they started asking questions. “Who are you? Where do you come from? Why are your clothes better than the others? How come the foreman knew you? Etc.etc.
That was a very grueling interrogation and then that night I was taken to the Kapos room there, and there the interrogation continued in many languages including Russian, because in this camp there were about 100 Soviet POWs. As you know the Germans did not honor the Geneva Convention for the Soviet Prisoners of War. But then soon the questioning turned the other way, they realized that I knew a lot more about Auschwitz than any of them because most of them, most of the survivors that you have interviewed have told you the same thing that in four or five days they were out of Auschwitz–I was there five months. So I became, at the end of that night, as tough as the questioning was I was accepted in the resistance organization there. That was a much more heterogeneous group than in Auschwitz. The two Kapos were German political prisoners, communists, in concentration camps since 1935.
BILL BENSON:
Nine years.
STEVEN FENVES:
Eleven years…Nine years. So you can imagine what that does to a person. A Soviet Cavalry Officer, Czech diplomat, a French doctor, a Czech cook was one of the greatest-every memoire of Niederorschel has a paragraph about this cook who out of scraps left from the soldiers table and vegetables and stuff that was organized somehow could provide some taste and variety in the potato soup that was the daily fare here. He was quite amazing. The plant was owned by the Junkers. Junkers were producing wings for Messerschmitt fighter planes.
First I worked on the detail that went to town to bring groceries, bread, etc. Then the SS officer decided I wasn’t strong enough to carry the stuff. So I was put in the factory next to the Hungarian interpreter on the inspection station. Wings were rolling-every fifteen minutes the Claxton sounded and the wing moved from one station to the next and more and more stuff was added to it. I was on the inspection station, which was the only one that was entitled to stop the assembly line. Our job was to check every rivet that it was properly driven and look for tears in aluminum that could cause a breakage. Well, you could sometimes stop the line by drilling out perfectly good rivets pretending they were bad. Sometimes you located a tear and instead of drilling a hole to stop the fracture path, you signaled the Soviet POWs on the next station on where to put the camouflage paint a little thicker than otherwise.
BILL BENSON:
So really you were engaging in sabotage wherever you could.
STEVEN FENVES:
Sabotage everywhere. I had a friend from Novi Sad from a nearby town working installing electrical cables, he was very clever to get to the plane 30 seconds before the official start of his shift, cutting the cable and then calling the alarm that the wing came from the previous station with cut cables. People were stealing everything they could from the supply room, German foreman were constantly yelling at us because supplies were disappearing. Some of them went into making weapons. Some scraps of aluminum went into creating beautiful crafted boxes that could be traded on the black market….
BILL BENSON:
With the German soldiers?
STEVEN FENVES:
With the German civilians. This little museum that Norma and I visited doesn’t have any of the aluminum things that I remember but beautiful wall decorations made of straw that prisoners made. I mean, you know the atmosphere in this camp was really unbelievable. You know that, you expect that there would be shoe makers who could re-sole shoes with pieces from rubber tires found along the road, tailors that bartered thread and needle could fix the clothes, but there were craftsmen of every kind and weapon makers of every kind, even teachers. I mentioned it to you that there were about nine kids of my age, they decided our education couldn’t be interrupted so after 12 hour shifts they seated us down for lessons in Agebra and French.
BILL BENSON:
In French...
STEVEN FENVES:
Later I learned French, but I don’t think that helped me a lot then. But that was the atmosphere, everybody was doing something at all times. I’m glad to report that none of those planes ever flew. This, you know, even when we went there in the ‘80s I was surprised to find out the plant was only opened in the spring of ’44. It was only the last attempt to disperse the, to distribute the German war economy that these places were set up and we were supposed to get parts from one camp and then send the wings to another camp where they would be mated with the bodies. Apparently that never happened and we knew that the railroad line was bombed and then we knew that the wings were just being piled in the snow. But they kept us working at reduced production. I remember I was taken off the assembly line and I had to make little clips that hold the cables by hand. Previously the clips came in boxes by the thousands from another factory.
BILL BENSON:
But those stopped and you were making them by hand?
STEVEN FENVES:
So that was, slowly it was grinding down.
BILL BENSON:
Steve you would actually remain there for six months until April of 1945.
STEVEN FENVES:
Right
BILL BENSON:
And of course by that time the war is coming to a close and so the SS force you out at that point and send you on a death march. Will you tell us about that and then your liberation?
STEVEN FENVES:
The order for the march came late at night. We expected it. We knew it was coming because the inmates who were taking the food to the guards saw them pack. The younger people wanted to stage a revolt, we knew that we could-we calculated that we could overpower the guards. We had counterfeit keys to all of the guard’s rooms including the weapons room. You ask how do you make counterfeit keys–well you have keys to go take the guards food, you take with you a lump of slightly chewed bread. You press the key… in your mold and somebody with a stolen file from the factory can clean the key.
The Kapos wouldn’t go along, they thought we don’t know where the Americans were, we didn’t know what kind of reinforcements were around-so we went on the march. Ten days on the road, differing memories of how much time spent where, but everyone agrees we left on April 1 and arrived at Auschwitz, in Buchenwald April 10. Escape attempts many nights, less and less food – at the beginning we were trailed by an old truck on which some of the relief guards could sleep and the truck pulled a World War I vintage field kitchen which sometimes worked and most of the time didn’t. We spent one or two nights in a satellite camp even closer to Buchenwald where we found some rotting, near frozen potatoes which we roasted and ate. Probably half roasted, a quarter roasted. And we tried to slow down.
BILL BENSON:
And your guards at this point were not SS?
STEVEN FENVES:
Guards as I remember where German Wehrmacht reservists. 50ish, 60ish men. Sweltering under these heavy army coats, carrying rifles. But then in the satellite camp they were replaced by SS guards.
BILL BENSON:
Before you tell us what happened when the SS guards came, you had your arm broken?
STEVEN FENVES:
Yeah, first time in nine months I was stupid enough to talk back to one of the guards and he took his rifle off his shoulder and swung it at me and all I had time to do was put my arm up and…and he broke it. And the SS officer allowed us to stop for a few minutes and a couple inmates got some tree limbs and shirt strips, strips from shirts and I had a make-shift sling which I carried for the next seven or eight days.
So we arrived at this small camp called Berlstedt which was the brick factory that supplied bricks to various, to the Buchenwald camp and other camps. And new guards came and these were SS and in the staff car with several SS officers was a Kapos, again a political prisoner, with the beret that was common in Buchenwald. And I could see that he was shuffling around, sort of recognizable that he wanted to talk. And so without clearing it with anybody I just crept up to him and squatted down and he said in Polish, “Do you speak Polish?” “Yes.” “Do you have an organization?” “Yes.”…I said I am one you can speak and he took a long look and he said “Okay, camp is being emptied out. Thousands upon thousands are shipped out in open railroad cars, nobody knows where they are going. Try to stall.”
By that time a SS sergeant was there kicking me so I ran away. I reported that to the Kapos, so we didn’t know what to do, how to stall and this Czech ministry official, former ministry official, said “There’s a way out. You have to work on their infernal precision.” Up to this point to local officers were in charge-whom they killed, whom they brought along didn’t matter. But now official count was taken up to Buchenwald, the officer has to deliver that many bodies dead or alive the following morning. So three of the people who had been in that camp before, knew the kilns and decided to the hide in the kilns in the morning when the appell sounded. The appell was called…
BILL BENSON:
And appell was the role call?
STEVEN FENVES:
…The roll call was called and we were three short and the SS officers went absolutely crazy and SS were sent everywhere to look. And I thought that we would stage a break down right there. At one point I think there were just four guards with machine guns at each end. We had twenty people in front and back ready to pounce on them…and I was sure that a break would happen, but it didn’t. And then for the first time that I recall you could hear gun fire and the sound from the front and that was enough for the SS. They packed us up and marched us up the hill.
BILL BENSON:
Not finding the three that hid?
STEVEN FENVES:
No. And so we arrived late at night and yeah I guess the headlights was the first thing I remember. The picture that you identified as the field hospital, that was actually the opposite side of Buchewald which was a very large rest and recreation area for SS. Camp was on one side of the hill and so you went on the road between those two and we were marched into the camp. Our Kapos were greeted by other Kapos and they immediately left us and I knew things were different. From the other’s descriptions I knew where the crematoria was, there was no smoke. I knew where the quarantine was where people were kept before releasing them in camp and the quarantine gates were open. We were marched into a building, not to the little camp which was the Jewish camp of Buchenwald, but in the main camp. And I went to bed. I mean, somebody pointed me to a bunk and I collapsed. Now I understand from other survivor’s memoires that the following day there was one more roll call, one more appell where the Jews were supposed to line up as on previous days and shipped out as on previous days. The Jews were lined up and then all hell broke loose and they were not taken. I slept through all of that until the following afternoon somebody shook me and said, “The Americans are here.” And I walked, ran up to the gate.
BILL BENSON:
And there they were.
STEVEN FENVES:
And there they were.
BILL BENSON:
And you were very, very ill at that point.
STEVEN FENVES:
I am told that I collapsed again against the fence and that I woke up two or three weeks later in this field hospital at the 150th evacuation put up, staffed by German civilians-German doctors and nurses.
BILL BENSON:
That the Americans rounded up in the community?
STEVEN FENVES:
That the Americans rounded up in the Weimar and the surrounding community.
BILL BENSON:
Steve we are actually at our time when we need to close up. Before we do, I’m going to turn back to Steve to ask another question and then we’ll turn to Steve to close our program so you all can go because it’s past 2:00 but Steve after you got out of the field hospital you would end up going back to your home time and end up being reunited with your sister and your father. Will you just say a little bit about that?
STEVEN FENVES:
Yeah, I had the opportunity come directly to the States, there was a provision for displaced orphans to be sent directly to the States. I thought it anybody survived they would go home and so I did the same thing. I don’t know, it seemed rather natural to do that. I was greeted by two of my surviving cousins and this very nice farm family took me out to fatten me up and I acquired jaundice so I can’t give blood because it looks like hepatitis.
And then a few weeks later my sister came back and my father came back on a Russian, on a Soviet Army hospital train in terrible conditions and he was totally broken. He died early February 1946. And so we tried to resume our life but there was not much life left to resume in Communist Yugoslavia so three years later we got out of there.
BILL BENSON:
And if we had more time we would hear Steve talk about escaping from Communist Yugoslavia to make it to Paris and eventually making it to the States in the 1950’s. I’m sorry we don’t have time for questions and answers, Steve will you be available for a few minutes afterwards?
STEVEN FENVES:
Oh yes, sure.
BILL BENSON:
So if you want when we finish please feel free to come to meet Steve and ask questions him that we’ve not had time to do here. I’d like to thank all of you for joining us this week, remind you that we will have a First Person each Wednesday until August 25th and on Tuesdays until the end of July.
Our next program is tomorrow when our first person will be Inge Katzenstein who is from Germany. Mrs. Katzenstein and her family fled Germany following Kristallnacht, or “The Night of Broken Glass,” to Kenya. They struggled to rebuild their life in Kenya until 1947, and then the Mao Mao uprising occurred in Kenya and then they made their way to the United States. It’s our tradition at First Person that our first person has the last word and so with that I’d like to turn back to Steve to close today’s program
STEVEN FENVES:
Well my students have always complained to me that my answers to their questions are always too long [laugh] I apologize that after 10 years after retiring from teaching I still take too long to explain everything, but I greatly appreciate your interest in coming here and I certainly greatly appreciate the attention you have given me. Thank you very much. [Applause]
