I was born on May 2, 1933, in the Carpathian area of Czechoslovakia, in the village of Nadbereg. My parents divorced when I was young, and my father lived in America, in New York. My mother married a second time to an accountant, a very good man. They worked very hard at raising us, and then we were sent to Auschwitz.

Prior to 1939 our region was occupied by the Czechoslovakian Army, but in 1939 the Hungarian Army arrived and took over. At that point we were considered to be in Hungary. There was still some peace, but not like there had been during the Czech period. Under Czechoslovakian rule life was wonderful. By 1943 the conditions had turned very poor, especially for Jews.

In 1944 the Germans finally arrived. They were in Hungary prior to that, in Budapest, but not near us. Once they arrived in our area they began taking us away to the camps. They didn’t take us all at once, but put us first in a ghetto in Beregovo, a city near our village, and then took us in groups to Auschwitz. They took my step-father, mother, sister and me at the same time. My mother’s father had died in 1935, but my grandmother was still alive. She was living at the time with another one of her daughters in the  Beregovo ghetto.

They took us to a train station and put us into boxcars made for horses and other animals. Right after we arrived at the camp, a man yelled in Hungarian: “twins, doctors, and pharmacists!” My sister and I were twins, but we stood there with our mother. They took the three of us away and tattooed us, gave us numbers on our arms. After 70 years, my number hasn’t faded. They found a place for our mother in a labor camp, and we were in that camp as well but in the children’s block, where they kept the twins.

There were around 200 to 250 pairs of twins in the camp. Doctor Mengele was there, and conducted experiments on twins. Every three or four weeks they would take blood from us for some type of experiment. We didn’t eat well, but we were in the worker’s camp so we ate better than some. That was important, since they tested our blood and checked our eyes, hair, height and weight.

They had adult twins there as well. I remember there were two adult twins from Holland, Helga and her sister, whose name I can’t remember. We only talked with the children who spoke Hungarian, like us, and not with the children who spoke other languages. We’d always spoken Hungarian in our home, even though my village was in Czechoslovakia when I was born.

I don’t want to remember the camp. It was horrible. The children’s block was right next to the block where they took the dead and dying from the labor camp. There were so many dead bodies, all naked. It was horrible to see: young people, the elderly, and children. I will never forget it – I would like to forget, but I can’t. We could have gone outside the barracks, but the building with the dead and dying was right there. We didn’t want to go outside.

My sister and I were able to secretly communicate with our mother when she was in the labor camp at Auschwitz, but in September 1944 they took her to Germany with other laborers. She survived and returned home after the liberation, but her legs were in bad condition. My poor step-father died in another camp after it was liberated. He was also taken to Germany, to a labor camp where they needed extra workers. The work there was difficult, as it was in a missile factory.

We twins weren’t required to do anything in the camp. Perhaps other children worked; we didn’t know. But the twins did nothing. They did take us once to harvest tomatoes in a garden. In general we didn’t do anything. We ate, but not properly. There was a set of triplets, two boys and a girl, and only one of the boys lived. The other two died because there wasn’t enough food. Some died even after the Russians liberated us. The Russians didn’t give us anything to eat either.

We didn’t have proper beds in the barracks we lived in, just wooden planks without mattresses. We had things to cover up with, but it was not like home. It was very cold. The last time the Germans took us anywhere was in December 1944. They were leaving by then, because the Russian Army was very close. At first the Germans left, but then they returned to take those of us that remained at Birkenau back to Auschwitz. Strangely, though we were children, we were taken after the adults. When we arrived at Auschwitz, we saw that the adults just standing there, not moving. We wondered what had happened.

The Germans escaped and left us at the side of the road. There were nice buildings not far away, so we went there. A woman from our village was there with her daughter, who was two years older than my sister and me. The daughter had survived well, and had been put to work. They’d found the place where the Germans cooked, and there was still a little food left, so the woman started cooking what she could: potatoes and potato soup. We took the soup to another building where other people were staying. There were only men there, all of them bare-boned. We were eleven years old then, and found our uncle in that building, which was truly a miracle. Every day we brought him food and fed him.

We stayed there for a while, because there was nowhere else to go. Everything around us was bombed. Finally, either in January or February, they took the children to Katowice, in Poland. There were French people in Katowice who would say to us, “Come to France with us, you can live with us. We will be your parents.” But we didn’t want to.

We couldn’t get home because all the routes were bombed and the trains couldn’t move. In March the Russians assigned a soldier to us, and we were put into boxcars, the same sort that we’d arrived in. The Russian escorted us home. We knew how to get home because we’d talked with our parents about this. We had even determined where we’d meet them.

When we arrived home none of our family members were there. We lived with strangers in our village, which was then controlled by the Russians. Finally, others started coming home. My uncle arrived first, my mother’s brother, then my mother’s sister arrived, my aunt. She was the one my grandmother had lived with. It turned out that my grandmother had been taken to Auschwitz with my aunt. They kept my aunt to work in the labor camp and killed my grandmother. This was how things were in the camp: the old were led to the gas chambers and the young were taken away to be used as labor. I remember that when we arrived at the camp someone pointed at the tall smoke stacks, the sorts you see at factories, and said, “See that? That’s where your grandmother is now.”

My aunt had a wonderful family before the war: a good husband and two sons. The older son was sixteen and the younger son was the same age as my sister and me. Except for my aunt, the rest of them died in the camps. After everyone else had returned home, my mother arrived. She had survived.

Afterwards, there were people in Hungary who would say, “You came home better off than when you left,” but there are just those sorts of people. How can people be so bad? But there were also very wonderful people who I will never forget. When we were still in the ghetto, one of our village neighbors baked bread and brought it to us there. She risked her life doing that, because she could have been forced to remain with us. She wasn’t Jewish; she was a Jehovah’s Witness. She was a wonderful woman. There were no neighbors like that in the camps. Nobody even cared for the children there.

We left for Israel in 1972, where we lived for three years. Then my husband went to America, where his cousins lived. They were his age and had invited him to come. My husband went a little earlier than the rest of the family to find work. We all arrived in America in 1975. My real father, who had moved to America when I was very young, died in 1969, so I never got to see him. But he would send packages to us in our village after Hungary was under Russian control.

The tattoo on my arm still shows. It is A-3638. My sister’s was A-3637, and my mother’s was A-3636. They gave us these numbers in order, and when they called my sister and me for our blood tests they didn’t use our names; they called out our numbers. In Auschwitz, our numbers were our names.