One of the Few (Testimony of Mrs Géza Hajdu, née Dr. Erzsébet Szilárd)

Dr. Erzsébet Szilárd was deported by the Hungarian authorities from Kaposvár, one of the centres of Deportation Zone V, to Auschwitz-Birkenau in the first days of July 1944. She survived the selection and was first taken by the Nazis to Ravensbrück, then to a camp near Berlin as a slave labourer. In the spring of 1945, the surviving prisoners were taken to the Oranienburg concentration camp. In the weeks of the total Nazi collapse in April, the Germans drove the prisoners out of the camp on foot in a north-westerly direction. The exhausted Erzsébet Szilárd stayed behind the column and luckily was not noticed by the guards. Her life was eventually saved by German civilians. Her testimony was given on her return to Kaposvár in November 1945. Her story was rare: barely one tenth of the Jews deported from the city survived the Holocaust. (Source: Hungarian Jewish Museum and Archives, DEGOB protocols)

Cover image: The data sheet of the Neologue Kaposvár Jewish Community, compiled in the spring of 1944 on the orders of the occupying German authorities (Hungarian Jewish Museum and Archives)