Jeno and Aranka were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau on the transport that departed on the 19th of July 1944. On arrival at Birkenau Jeno passed the selection and received the number 5949B. Aranka was murdered in the camp.
Their daughter Judy was sent to Auschwitz on a different date. She survived and was liberated at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. From there, she returned to Hungary where she was reunited with her cousin Edith Spitzer. The two of them immigrated to Australia. Judy died in Australia in 1979, childless and at the age of 52.
The Transport
On the 7th of July 1944, Admiral Miklos Horthy, Regent of Hungary, stopped the deportation of Jews from Hungary. Adolf Eichmann, who was furious at Horthy's interference, tried to send an additional transport of 1,500 Jews on the 15th of July. According to the information received by Horthy from Istvan Vasdenyei, Commandant of the Hungarian camp Kistarcsa, the transport was returned to Kistarcsa before leaving Hungarian territory.
On the 19th of July 1944, Eichmann sent his aide Franz Novak and a team of specialists in the deportation of Jews to Kistarcsa. That morning all members of the central committee for the Jews in Budapest were summoned to a meeting in the SS offices. They were there from 10 am and they were forbidden from making telephone calls; that day the final transport departed from Kistarcsa with 1,200 Jews aboard. Only in the evening, once the transport had already left Hungarian territory on its way to Auschwitz, were the committee members released to go home.
On the 14th of August 1944 in Auschwitz, 350 Hungarian Jews received the numbers 5860B – 6209B and became inmates of the camp. These were the inmates who had left Kistarcsa in July.
