WHEN GUNSKIRCHEN WAS LIBERATED in the first days of May 1945 by the 71st Infantry of the United States Army, most of those still alive there reacted with shock, disbelief, and gratitude. The guards had fled four days before. The liberators found nearly ten thousand bodies in a huge communal grave. But what really shocked them was the indescribably awful smell of the place.
The liberators were greeted with cheers, shrieks, and groans. They stopped in their tracks from complete disbelief of what they were witnessing: the skeletal shells of human beings.
The well-dressed and fed American soldiers, desperate to do something immediately for these poor unfortunate souls, started handing out boxes of food and cigarette rations. Some survivors simply fell upon the food rations and devoured them, including the tobacco rations. After so many months of starvation rations, their digestive tracts could not absorb the rich caloric foods, such as cold corned beef, and they died shortly after consuming the army rations.
Suti and Vilmos simply stared at the soldiers, and at the box of food rations handed to them, which they didn’t have the strength to open. The army commanders asked a Hungarian-speaking survivor to translate for them. “Don’t leave this place. The commanders are pleading with us not to go — they will look after us here. They will have water and food and medics for everyone in a matter of hours. Don’t go, there is nowhere to go to.”
But a type of mass hysteria took hold of the survivors, who simply wanted to leave this hellhole. The emaciated father and son, Suti and Vilmos, both sick with typhus, their bodies covered in lice, trudged out of Gunskirchen.
The road leading out was clogged with hundreds of survivors walking slowly but determinedly, many hanging on to relatives or friends, trying to place as much distance between themselves and this place of horrors as possible. Joining the parade of fleeing skeletons, not knowing how they were mustering the strength, Suti and Vilmos walked and kept going until they found themselves in front of a house in the nearby town of Wels. They stopped and knocked on the door of a stranger. After what seemed like many minutes, an elderly Austrian woman tentatively opened the door and peered out. The old woman couldn’t hide the look of shock on her face. Neither she nor her visitors said anything as the two pushed past her and walked into the house. She closed the door and followed them inside.
They walked to the back to the kitchen and sat down on handcrafted wooden chairs that surrounded a small wooden table. The kitchen was sparsely decorated. They simply stared at her.
“I have no food, nothing to eat,” she began, wringing her hands and looking very nervous. “My husband and son are gone — lost on the front. There’s no one here but me — I have nothing to give you. I have lost everything during this war. I’ve lost my entire family.”
The silence in the room was deafening. Minutes passed. Then, she noticed Suti and Vilmos scratching themselves and realized that she had to act quickly to prevent the lice from spreading. She collected herself, put some water on the stove, and lit the fire underneath. She made tea and introduced herself as Frau Hans Asen. Pouring hot water in a pan, she led them into the garden and motioned for them to wash themselves. Finding some clean clothing from her husband and son, she suggested they change and directed them to throw their lice-infested clothing into the fireplace in the garden. She then lit a fire under the filthy clothes.
Within a day or so, trucks with loudspeakers roamed around the district announcing that a place had been prepared for camp survivors. The American army gathered the survivors into a German military facility, which had been the last active airbase of the Luftwaffe at Horsching. The airbase was transformed into a place where survivors would be able to gather their strength and obtain meals.
Suti and Vilmos were transported to the base. They lived in a room originally intended for five or six soldiers, but now housed twenty or more concentration camp survivors. They slept on straw mattresses and blankets strewn about on the floor, most still comatose and dazed from their experiences, some dying, some recovering. The daily death rate of the survivors was sizeable: some seventy to one hundred dead bodies were removed from the facility to be buried in a mass grave designated as such in front of the building.
The American army was not prepared to deal with this legacy of the war — there were no kitchens set up to prepare hot food. They were provided with bread, tea, and some other food supplies, but survivors frequently helped themselves to U.S. rations in the storage areas.
Suti realized that his father was gravely ill, but didn’t want to face the reality of the situation. He continued to bring his father tea and coaxed him to eat a bit of bread, but most of the time Vilmos didn’t even open his eyes. When he did, Suti noticed he had a distant, dazed look in his eyes. Suti needed his father, however, now more than ever.
An American Jewish doctor who was a major in the U.S. Army created a clinic to rehabilitate those concentration camp survivors who were, in his assessment, capable of regaining their strength. Suti was chosen to go to this ad hoc clinic nearby in Horsching. Choking back tears, trying to put on a brave face, Suti said goodbye to his dying father, who was by then in a comatose state. But Suti’s anxiousness was turning into anger by this point: anger toward the remoteness of his father. Why wouldn’t he snap out of his haze? They were free now, he was getting medication and nutrition, and more than ever Suti needed his guidance and help. Why was he shutting himself off from his son?
Suti spoke straight to him, saying his final farewells. No response came. No motion, no sound was made as Suti left, feeling his father had already abandoned him.
At the clinic, Suti fell into a deep sleep that lasted ten days. He was fed intravenously. When he came to, no one could explain to him whether he had fallen into a coma, or had slept so long and so deeply from sheer exhaustion.
Suti awoke one morning to overhear the attending doctor telling the nurse that he was being sent to a sanatorium in Switzerland for long-term treatment and recovery. Suti knew that under no circumstances did he want to be sent west. He grabbed some clothes out of a closet and made his way surreptitiously out of the clinic and back to the base where he left his father. On arrival, he was told that Vilmos Weisz had passed away on May 22, 1945. To the great chagrin of Suti, he learned his father had been buried in the mass grave at Horsching Air Force Base, directly in front of the building where they had been housed.
In May 1945, the fifteen-year-old concentration camp survivor found himself completely alone in the world. At that point in his life, he felt the tremendous pull of home. There was only one direction he wanted to go: east, back home to Nagyszollos.