“I remember that one day they picked me up to bring coffee from the kitchen. Instead of coffee there was coloured water. I grabbed big cans and went to the kitchen. They were peeling potatoes there and I stashed the dirty potato peels into my trousers. Then I was standing by the workbench for eight hours like that, doing my work, and then I walked ten kilometres to the camp. In our barrack we had a stove and with a stovepipe that led to the chimney, and I stuck the peels on that stovepipe and baked them. I ate them with all the dirt and sand.”
“I remember that when the Allies bombed Germany, the guards would always hide in shelters and we were not allowed to go anywhere. One day, airplanes appeared above the camp and instead of bombs, they were dropping one-kilo loaves of bread. Heaps of bread, and we were grabbing them and devouring them. The whole yard in the camp was full of bread.”
“One day they made us stand in line and board railway cars. We went somewhere and we did not know where. I remember that the train moved slowly uphill until it came to a stop in a forest. I said farewell to everybody. They pushed us out of the cars, some people were kicked out. There was a woman with a baby with us. A guard grabbed the baby and smashed it against the car. The child hit the car with its head and fell dead to the ground. Its mother went insane, and they shot her at the spot. They made us go and we thought that we were going to die. We walked in rows of five and we held our hands, and we came to a gate, behind which – to our surprise – there were living people and many barracks. There was not space for all of us, and so they made us stay under a tent canvas. We sat there in the freezing air and snow for two days without food and water.”
“I had a friend in Penig, where we worked in a factory and lived in a camp in the forest. Her name was Věruška, she was Slovak, and she was seriously ill. She had fever and there was no water. One day I got a cup of soup in the factory. I carried this soup for Věruška for ten kilometers to the camp so that she could drink it. I didn’t have any gloves and it was freezing so much that ice formed in the soup. But when I came to the camp, she had already died. My hands were completely frozen.”
“I will tell you one more thing. Those who have not experienced something like this, those who have had everything in their lives, are not able to sympathize with another human being. Only those people who have been through something like that can feel sympathy to others. I have experienced insane things. In the concentration camp, I saw them throwing living people into a cauldron with boiling water. I saw them hang a man and skin him and use the skin to make lamps. I met a German whose fingers they had chopped off. I have seen insane things and I have experienced insane things. I saw dead people being pulled by their hair like rags into the inferno where they were then cremated.”
Klára Gerendášová was born February 4, 1921 in Velká Sevljuša (present-day Vynohradiv) in Carpathian Ruthenia (now Ukraine). She comes from a Jewish family. After the death of her mother she lived with her grandparents first and then in Budapest after she turned fourteen. In 1944 she was interned in the Jewish ghetto in Budapest. From there she was taken to the country side near the town Pásztó, where she had to work on digging anti-tank trenches. In the beginning of 1944 she was transported to the women‘s concentration camp in Ravensbrück and from there to the labour camp in Penig. She suffered a serious hand injury while working as a lathe operator there. The wound became infected due to poor sanitary condition and the camp doctors wanted to amputate her hand. However, she has saved her hand - and perhaps her life as well - by running away from the operation theatre. A day later the camp was evacuated and the prisoners set out on a death march, Klára Gerendášová and some other female prisoners managed to escape and reach US Army troops. After the war she moved to Karlovy Vary where she has been living since that time. She has been working in the hospitality industry for her entire life. She has a son Ladislav, who is a well-known actor and musician, and a daughter, Anna. Klára Gerendášová passed avay on April 30, 2015.
