Alexander Speiser

"We returned on foot, dogs accompanied us all the time and whenever anyone deviated from the lines, dogs attacked him immediately. A car came and pulled up by us, with the Lageführer, Obesturmführer Jelinek. A Czech name of Slav origin. "Come aside. He took me to a car and then took me to his home. He had three sons. He asked them: 'From today... Do you want him?' 'Yes.' – 'From today you will clean and cook everything that my sons need.' So every morning instead of going to a BMW factory I was taken by an SS guard to Jelinek's house, where he had his family, and I cooked and cleaned everything. I reminded myself, I was the youngest boy at home and my mother, whenever she cooked, she told me, 'Come here, look at how I do it.' I responded, 'Mum, I'm not a girl, I'm a boy.' – 'You can never know what life asks of you.' So I cooked tasty things and boys liked it.

"My father was a month or a month and a half after a surgery and my mother... We sat together, the three of us, my brothers had already been taken to camps by the Hungarians, it was Horthy's policy that he needed workforce. My mother... My father laid a hand on my mum's hand, and my mother said: ,Son, I don't know what happens tomorrow, what happens the day after tomorrow, but wherever we get and you are with your father, take care of him. You must promise me this.' I swore, I promised to my mother that I would take care of my father. A promise was kept in our family. You said something and you had to do it. This was how we were educated."

"At midnight, two, three, I awoke. Weak, I dropped to all fours and crawled into a barrel that was there, I licked it inside all around for the remnants of food. While in this barrel, I felt asleep. In the morning, at five six o'clock, a truck would arrive, collect the barrels and the dead and put them on the truck. They go. They didn't see that I was in the barrel. A miracle: the truck drives and the barrel falls on the road just by the house where my father was. Directly. I crawled out of it, the driver didn't see that a barrel fell, I walked and saved myself. But they were very precise, the Germans, they were, a few hours before they recorded that there there were too many and here one too few, so they repeated it, I was like one more, and there they had on less, so in this way I saved myself