"My mother was so naive"

Dachau - Due to the corona, the known eyewitness talks at the concentration camp memorial are currently only taking place in digital form. But despite the distance, despite the separation by a screen, the accounts of the Holocaust survivors are no less impressive. On Wednesday, 91-year-old Peter Johann Gardosch reported on his life and answered questions from Maximilian Lütgens, educational assistant at the concentration camp memorial.

Gardosch was twelve years old and had been living in Hungary when he first came into contact with anti-Semitism. "We could only enter the corner shop through the back door, as many shops had a note saying 'We don't serve Jews' in the windows." At this point in time, people knew about the deportations of the Jewish population. But his mother reassured him: In the event of a deportation, they would come to a “civilized Germany”. But “what happened then”, says Gardosch sadly, “we all know”.

He and his family were arrested in June 1944. The 91-year-old still remembers the morning of the arrest: “They rang the bell in the morning, then we had to follow them on foot to a brick factory. There was simply nothing there. ”From the workshop we went on to the train station. In the wagon, according to Gardosch, "70 penned passengers had to share a single bucket of water and chamber pot". The trip, according to Gardosch, "was scary" - but nothing compared to what was to come next.

At 4 a.m., the train reached Auschwitz. "Many lamps on high fences were lit, everything looked like something from another planet," he remembers his first impressions. German officers would then have divided the prisoners into two columns. “My mother was so naive as to buy a straw hat to protect against sunstroke,” says Gardosch with a smile. “She was so naive and thought we would have to work in agriculture.” In fact, he saw his mother for the last time at the selection ramp. The 39-year-old, Gardosch's eight-year-old sister, and his grandmother were put on the gas that same day.

According to him, the fact that he survived the selection as a 13-year-old was because he made himself three years older. “I was skinny, and before I left my grandmother had told me to put on the city fur. I replied that she was crazy to give me a fur coat in the summer. But grandmother insisted. The coat made me look bulkier, it saved my life. ”Then the newcomers were“ undressed, shaved, and our things were put on hooks with numbers that we should remember in order to pick them up later. But that was a lie, we never saw the things again ”.

The boy spent a total of 19 days in Auschwitz before he came to the Kaufering III subcamp in Dachau, where Jewish prisoners were supposed to build airplanes in underground facilities under inhuman working conditions. Gardosch perceived the arrival as a “small ray of hope” because, unlike in Auschwitz, it was downright “peaceful” there. Gardosch was very lucky, as he reports. An SS man who worked for the camp commandant selected the boy on the basis of his knowledge of German and let him do simpler work.

In view of the approaching end of the war, however, the SS had the camp evacuated at the end of April 1945 and sent the prisoners on the notorious death marches in the direction of Munich. Gardosch and his father took advantage of the chaotic hour: “It was pitch dark and we were waiting for the right moment when a truck accident happened on the way to Allach and panic broke out. We fled immediately! ”The refugees found shelter in the Fürstenfeldbruck monastery. There, he will never forget, he then ate “the best jacket potato of my life”!

After the liberation, he and his father returned to their Hungarian homeland. “It was a bitter feeling of happiness because the house was empty without my mother and sister,” says the 91-year-old about his former parents' house. In 1963 he emigrated to Israel and only later returned to Germany, where he studied and worked as a multilingual management consultant with international contacts.

Only years later did he manage to talk about his terrible childhood.

“A friend finally persuaded me to do it.” He has now visited the Auschwitz Memorial three times.

Gardosch processed his experiences in his books, "Die Wiedergutmachung" (2011) and "At 13 through hell" (2019).

To this day he is committed as a contemporary witness, goes to schools and speaks out against anti-Semitism.

And Peter Johann Gardosch will soon be on television too!

Because: Half a year ago the Ikarus Filmstudios Bayern contacted him for a film shoot.

The extermination of the Hungarian Jews in Auschwitz - around 500,000 people were murdered there within eight weeks - Gardosch describes today as the "greatest massacre in history".

Tamina Hindelang