From Bonyhád to Bergen-Belsen (Testimony of Aranka Simon)

Aranka Simon was one of the thousands of Hungarian Jews whom the perpetrators deported from West Hungary, deportation zone V, to Auschwitz and from there to Northern Germany. The former Bonyhád resident worked as a slave labourer for the Nazis in Bremen and was then taken to Bergen-Belsen, where she was liberated by British troops in April 1945. She gave her testimony in Hungarian in Budapest in July 1945, a few months after the horrors she had experienced. (Source: Hungarian Jewish Museum and Archives, DEGOB protocols)

Cover image: The Neologue synagogue in Bonyhád before the Holocaust. In 1944, Hungarian authorities set up one of the two city ghettos in the streets around the building (Hungarian Jewish Museum and Archives)