‘What helped you to survive?’

Many people do not believe in chance, but if I am to answer the question of what helped me to survive, it is all that I can point to. Without chance, nothing could have helped. There was no logic in the camp; you never knew where to be, or not to be, in order to survive. You might be killed by an SS officer doing target practice just for the fun of it. A kindness could mean death; Dr Mengele, for example, was known for giving out sweets to the children he would then torture with his experiments.

‘How did you cope?’ many students say to me. ‘I would have died.’

You may think so, but dying is not easy. It can be difficult to live, but it is all that we know, and we cling to life until the very end.

Many nights, after a hard day’s work, I thought that I could not go on for another day. But when I woke up, I was once again the obedient lamb that carried out the same tasks as yesterday, in the hope that, as long as I did as they said, they would not shoot me. While there is life in us, we want to go on living, no matter what happens. Many of us were tortured, and still did not give up. I hope that I too would have clung to life in that situation, but you never know what you will do.

In Auschwitz, I sometimes thought in despair: ‘Not one more day, tomorrow I will throw myself on the electric barbed wire.’ But then came the next thought: ‘This would do the Nazis’ work for them. It is, after all, what they want: to get rid of us.’

What helped guard against these gloomy thoughts was having my sister with me. We felt responsible for each other, there was a meaning to the meaninglessness. If she was downhearted, I tried to cheer her up. If I was sad, she joked around. We would probably not have survived without each other.

The solidarity, the circle of friends from my block, also meant a great deal. In the evenings, we sat around trying to dispel the bad thoughts with old and new stories, poems, and recipes. We tried to quell our hunger by ‘cooking’, explaining in detail how certain dishes should be prepared, until we could almost smell the stuffed cabbage rolls and taste the meatballs.

There were some other things that were also crucial to the survival of those of us from Hungary. Above all, the fact that we were not taken prisoner until the spring of 1944. It meant that we spent barely a year in the camp, unlike those who had to suffer for much longer.

The thought that we must survive in order to tell of everything that had happened to us after the war was often in our minds. At the same time, we doubted that anyone would want to listen.