In 1944, a rare set of photographs was taken at Auschwitz-Birkenau, documenting the arrival, selection, and imprisonment of 3,500 Hungarian Jews. Most were sent immediately to the gas chambers. This is the story of two people who survived.
Auschwitz-Birkenau was the largest killing center the Nazis created during the Holocaust. From 1941 to 1945, more than 1.1 million people were killed there, including nearly one million Jews.
George Levy was born in August 1929 in Czechoslovakia. His early life was happy and protected, with loving parents and a younger brother. But in 1938, things began to change.
Magda Brostein was born in Miskolc, Hungary, on June 11, 1927. Her life until the early 1940s was carefree. Her parents worked hard, and she had all the comforts she needed.
Germany invaded and occupied Hungary on March 19, 1944. Within a week, Jews were ordered to wear the Star of David. Jewish businesses were forced to close. Then came preparations to place all Jews into ghettos.
George’s hometown had been annexed by Hungary in 1938. On the morning of May 21, two gendarmes knocked on the door. They told his father they had about two hours to gather belongings and enter the ghetto.
George’s father considered poisoning the family rather than face what was coming. The family protested and cried, and he gave up the idea.
As they walked through town, people George had known his whole life began looting their belongings. Neighbors asked for his bicycle or accordion, promising to take care of them until the family returned. They simply took whatever they wanted.
The family ended up in a brick factory with no shelter, water, or sanitary facilities. It was next to the train tracks.
On her seventeenth birthday, Magda was pushed into a cattle car. It was so crowded that she stood for three days so her parents could sit on the wooden floor. In one corner, a young woman held a dead baby.
By Saturday morning, May 26, the train stopped. George’s father saw a station sign reading “Auschwitz.” He said the Germans were civilized people and probably would not hurt them.
The doors were thrown open violently. There was shouting and people with sticks and clubs, screaming in German: “Out, fast, fast.” The Nazis no longer spoke to them, only gestured. They were no longer human to them.
Men were separated from women. George never saw his father again. A Nazi officer pointed George in one direction and his mother in another. He caught a glimpse of her with his little brother getting off the train. Then they disappeared.
Magda was separated from her mother. From that moment, she said, she was an orphan.
Later, George saw a large group of people walking toward a building with smoke and flames coming from a tall chimney. They were told it was a bakery. It did not take long to learn the truth. People who had been there longer told him his little brother was going up in smoke.
In May 1944, Hungarian transports to Auschwitz-Birkenau began. It was the largest mass killing operation in modern history. Half of all Jews killed at Auschwitz were Hungarian Jews, killed within ten weeks at a rate of 6,000 people per day.
One night, George’s father came to the barracks to say goodbye. He hugged him and said, “Don’t forget me.” Then he disappeared.
George’s uncle had arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau before him. He found George one day and got him a job in the camp office. He warned George not to stay in his barracks that night, knowing which barracks would be targeted for selection. This likely saved his life.
At one point, George was placed near the Gypsy camp, the only place where families could stay together. Most able-bodied men had already been taken. In early August, the barracks were suddenly closed. The Gypsy camp was being liquidated.
Children, women, and the elderly were loaded onto trucks. There was crying and resistance, but no help came. SS guards forced them onto the trucks. They were all gassed that same night.
Magda was one of about a thousand Hungarian women transferred to the Altenburg concentration camp after two months in Auschwitz. There she was forced to make ammunition for the German army.
The factory roof was flat with trees growing on top, camouflaging it from reconnaissance planes. Inside, the work was dangerous. The toxic materials invaded their bodies. Hair turned orange, faces turned lemon yellow, and lips turned dark purple.
In October 1944, George learned his uncle had been transferred to another camp in Poland where prisoners worked in coal mines under terrible conditions. George volunteered to go there. He received his tattoo, B 10,511. He considered it a badge of honor because it meant he would work and not be killed immediately.
His uncle again intervened and got George a job as a servant in the SS barracks. This spared him from twelve-hour days shoveling coal in freezing cold. He also kept his weight because he could eat SS leftovers.
In January 1945, rumors spread that the Soviets were approaching Auschwitz. The prisoners were forced to march in the middle of the night through wind and snow wearing only light clothing. Anyone who fell was shot and left to die. They marched over twenty miles to a train station and were loaded into open coal cars without food or water.
George and his uncle were taken to the Ebensee concentration camp in Austria. George shoveled coal and loaded wagons. He grew extremely thin. He was so hungry he ate gray soil found between the coal chunks, which someone said had nutritional value.
Magda struggled to survive in Altenburg for over six months. In March 1945, she and the other women were sent on a death march to Buchenwald. By then, she said, you lost your identity and became numb. You lived day to day, thinking only of survival.
On the third day of the march, the women noticed fewer Nazi guards. About twelve of them crawled on their stomachs to a barn in a nearby field and hid in the straw. The next day, two young men in strange uniforms approached. They were from the Sixth Armored Division of the U.S. Army. Magda and the others were liberated.
George survived in Ebensee for more than three months. One morning, the camp commander ordered everyone to the parade ground. He said the Allies were close and suggested the prisoners go into the tunnels they had been building for protection. A prisoner who understood what was happening refused, knowing the tunnels had been filled with dynamite. The SS commander turned and left the camp. Soon all SS personnel departed in trucks.
George went to find his uncle but was told he had died three days earlier. His uncle had always told him, “You are young and strong. You will survive.”
On May 6, 1945, American forces liberated George and the remaining prisoners of Ebensee. He later went to Budapest to search for his great-aunt. While there, a telegram arrived from the Red Cross. It was from his father, who was alive in a hospital in Bavaria.
George reached the hospital and was taken to his father’s room. After more than two years apart, they were reunited.
On October 1, 1949, George passed the Statue of Liberty and arrived in New York. His cousin was waiting with a nearly new Ford. George thought, “This is America.”
In June 1950, the Korean War broke out. George became a recruit in the U.S. Air Force. In 1951, his father was healthy enough to come to the United States. They lived together for over twenty years.
George graduated with a doctorate in dental surgery. He taught at the University of Illinois for 29 years and ran his own practice for 15 years. He ended up with four wonderful daughters.
After the war, Magda returned to Hungary to see if anyone had survived. Her home had been taken over by others. She had no family and no home, and she was not yet eighteen.
In September 1946, she moved to Chicago with sponsorship from her aunts and uncles. She became a certified medical assistant, met a nice young Jewish American man, and married. They had two children, and later grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
George’s real name is not George Muller. It is George Levy, a Jewish name. For 45 years, he hid the fact that he was Jewish. Even his children knew nothing of his story until he told them.
The Holocaust did not happen in a minute. It developed gradually. George urges people to protect their freedom and their health. Once you lose your freedom, he says, you have lost everything.
George credits his uncle with saving his life. He hopes his story inspires others to do the same. One person’s actions can make a difference, even if it means saving just one life.
Another survivor, Steen, was born in Denmark. He was only five years old when the German army occupied Denmark in just six hours. Unlike other occupied countries, Denmark’s government remained in power and protected its Jewish population.
For the first three and a half years of the occupation, life was relatively normal for Danish Jews. Steen’s family did not have to wear the Star of David. He attended public school. His father continued to practice law.
But in August 1943, under Nazi pressure, the Danish government resigned. A Nazi plan was set to deport all Jews in early October. The Danish resistance responded by smuggling more than 7,000 Jews to safety in neutral Sweden. Fewer than 500 Jews remained to be deported. Steen and his family were among them.
On the morning of October 2, 1943, two Gestapo officers knocked on the door. It was Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. The Germans chose this day deliberately, knowing people would be home celebrating.
Steen’s family had only 45 minutes to prepare before being loaded into a cattle car. It was dark, dirty, and crowded. There was nothing to eat or drink. Buckets in the corner served as toilets. Steen was afraid, and he believed the adults were afraid too.
They arrived at Theresienstadt, a concentration camp in German-occupied Czechoslovakia. Their valuables were taken. Steen was separated from his father but allowed to stay with his mother because he was so young.
Steen’s father, a lawyer, was forced into hard labor. He was beaten and given very little food. He lost half his body weight and ended up in the infirmary. He died at age forty, less than six months after their arrival.
Steen and his mother slept on thin straw mattresses full of fleas and lice. They received little food, usually bread and boiled water with potato peels. Steen worked as a messenger, carrying Nazi documents between offices. He passed the kitchen and took raw potatoes from large sacks to share with his mother.
Steen played with other children in the camp. One day, his friends did not show up. His mother said she did not know what happened to them. He learned later that she was protecting him from the truth. They were likely among the 90,000 prisoners sent east to Auschwitz.
Meanwhile, George and his sister barely escaped death. In June 1943, it was announced that prisoners aged sixteen and under would be sent to a special children’s camp. That camp was Sobibor, a killing center in occupied Poland, where all 1,269 children were murdered in gas chambers immediately.
George and his sister survived because their guardian, Mr. Van Meekerenburg, convinced the camp commander that they were only half-Jewish. He had prepared documents claiming that George’s uncle in Chicago, who was not Jewish, was their real father.
George and his sister were then sent to Bergen-Belsen in Germany. They were placed in the “Star Camp” with other Jewish prisoners the Nazis hoped to exchange for German prisoners of war. At first they were treated better, but conditions soon worsened. Prisoners stood in the cold for hours in light clothing. Guards beat people to death. Lice spread typhus throughout the camp.
At Theresienstadt, where Steen was held, three Red Cross representatives were allowed to visit on June 23, 1944. The Nazis forced a Jewish prisoner filmmaker named Kurt Gerron to make a propaganda film to deceive the world about living conditions. Buildings were painted. Fake storefronts and banks were erected. The elderly and weak were deported so visitors would see only relatively healthy prisoners.
The delegation saw nothing of the real camp. Once the deception was complete, Gerron was deported to Auschwitz and killed in the gas chambers.
In the spring of 1945, one month before the camp was liberated by the Soviets, all Scandinavian prisoners, including the Danes, were released from Theresienstadt on April 15. They were liberated by the white buses sent by the Swedish Red Cross.
Steen and his mother returned to Denmark two weeks after the German surrender on May 5, 1945, Steen’s tenth birthday. It was bittersweet. They were home, but without his father.
Days after Steen was freed, Nazi officials ordered all Star Camp prisoners, including George and his sister, to be transported from Bergen-Belsen. They were loaded onto three trains heading to Theresienstadt, to be used as hostages.
One train was liberated by Americans. Another reached its destination. The third train stopped due to Allied bombing and disappeared. It is now known to historians as the “Lost Transport.” George and his sister were on it.
They wandered through Germany for thirteen days. The train was fired upon by Americans. At times it stopped in the countryside near farms. George knew he could escape, but everyone was sick and weak. He got off once to look for food and had to run after the train to rejoin his sister. His knees gave way and he fell, but he managed to catch up.
Each time they passed through a town, they learned the next day that it had been liberated by Americans. George knew it would happen soon. Early one morning, a woman screamed, “We are free.” Russian troops surrounded the guards. After thirteen days, the Russians liberated the train.
For three months, George and his sister managed on their own in the German countryside. Eventually, they were placed on another train to a U.S. Army hospital in Holland for treatment and recovery.
They returned to see Mr. Van Meekerenburg, who did not know where they were. When they knocked on his door, he was overjoyed. Their camp clothes were still full of lice, so they burned them in the garden.
George and his sister spent two years in Holland. In 1947, they came to the United States and lived mostly in Chicago with their uncle Joseph. George married, had children, and became a pharmacist with his own business.
Steen remained in Denmark until the early 1950s. His work eventually led him to Canada, where he met and married his wife. They moved to Chicago in 1962 and had children.
As a survivor, Steen wants to ensure no one ever forgets that the Holocaust happened. The late Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel said, “When you listen to a witness, you become a witness.” Now you are a witness.