Whenever I find myself in a slightly better frame of mind, when for a moment I snap out of this seven-month delirium, I am horrified to think of dying, of being deprived of so many wonderful moments of life to come, if I were hit by a stray bomb. I was terribly proud!) They came around 10: 00 in the morning and left around 3: 00. (When she was told I was courting you, she complimented me on my good taste. Last Sunday we had 6 visitors from other Lagers, among them a vivacious, animated girl of 18 by the name of Éva Krausz. Oh, if only you could come and see me once, my Judit! People from other Lagers are allowed to go on a leave. I haven’t given up the hope that, God willing, we may meet while both of us are still in the city. In any event, I was elated to learn you stayed in Vienna. I hear you have been transferred to Floridsdorf but nothing further about the nature of your work or circumstances. Not much has happened here in the meantime, but I believe all the more with you over there. We are well into the new year now as I revisit my diary for the first time. Leslie was able to hold onto his diary throughout the war years and after, and when he and Judy reunited, and later married, they held dear all the letters they had been able to keep as well. By September 1944, Leslie and Judy had found a way to write letters and postcards to each other. He addressed almost all of his diary entries to his girlfriend, Judit Felbermann (also known as Judith, or Judy, Felberman), whom he was separated from. While in captivity as a forced labourer in Austria during World War II, Leslie Fazekas (then László Frenkel, also referred to as Laci) wrote a diary in Hungarian from August 1944 to April 1945. The author of these outstanding wartime diaries and postwar memoir, László Frenkel, today Leslie Fazekas, was among them Many of the deportees in Austria fell victim to bomb raids, accidents, illnesses, hardships and arbitrary executions, but eventually the majority of this group, an estimated ten to twelve thousand people, survived the war. Living conditions, workload and treatment varied, but at large, the situation of Hungarian Jewish slave labourers in and around Vienna was relatively bearable, if compared to the extreme sufferings in other corners in the web of Nazi concentration and labour camps. Those unable to work were not murdered, and families were mostly allowed to stay together. Arriving at the distribution camp (Durchgangslager) in Strasshof, the Jews were transferred to various districts of Vienna and settlements in the vicinity, where they worked in different branches of war industry and in agriculture, as well as at rubble clean-up and construction sites. Moreover, they were indeed taken there primarily for work purposes. At the end of June 1944, more than 15, 000 people were transported to the Vienna region (Gau Groß-Wien), in Nazi-annexed Austria, rather than to the death camp. It is a less well-known fact, however, that some 3 percent of the deported Hungarian Jews actually escaped being sent to Birkenau. In the words of the towering Holocaust scholar Raul Hilberg, “Hungary was going to lift Auschwitz to the top” among other Nazi camps. It was due to the Hungarian campaign - Ungarnaktion, as the Nazi jargon put it - that Auschwitz ultimately became the universally known symbol of human genocide. Their destination was the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp complex, where three-fourths of them were gassed upon arrival, killing more than 300, 000 people: mainly women, children and the elderly. Then, mostly between mid-May and early July 1944, the Nazi and Hungarian authorities deported about 450, 000 people from the Hungarian provinces. However, following the German occupation of Hungary that very month, the Nazis and their local accomplices completed the disenfranchisement, plunder and isolation of the Jews in a period of a mere eight weeks. With the imminent defeat of the Nazis approaching, they had good reason to believe their sufferings would be over soon. In March 1944, some 750, 000 Jews living in Hungary represented by far the largest surviving community in Hitler’s Europe. The destruction of the Hungarian Jewish communities in the last phase of World War II was one of the most efficient genocidal campaigns in history. The letters are excerpted from Leslie Fazekas’s In Dreams Together. The below text is excerpted and condensed from the introduction and editorial note of In Dreams Together.
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