We came to Berge-Belsen. We thought that we came to something almost better, and what did we see? Concentration camp Bergen-Belsen in Germany. Daily muster on Appellplatz, day or night, rain or snow. It was already November – December. We had a bit of food, well not food, more like garbage. Musters, beatings, humiliation. Awful things were going on. In January we didn’t get any food. We were supposed to die of hunger. You didn’t have to do anything, just die. People were dying of hunger walking around like zombies. They walked, collapsed and died. Those who could stacked the corpses one on another, and I remember the terrible stench. Those bodies, even in winter, decomposed and smelled horribly. This was the beginning of diseases, mainly typhus. Typhus, typhus everywhere. Corpses and rotting bodies all around. This is my memory of Bergen-Belsen. That’s where Anne Frank died.
They took the family and everybody else. Luckily, they didn’t shoot anybody else. They took me and my mom and the others and put us into wagons and send probably to Sered for transfer. From there we were cramped again into wagons and were sent to Bergen-Belsen, which is near Hannover in North Germany. The trip took six or seven days. Iyt was around end of October or beginning of November, when the Allied forces were bombing Germany already. We had to stop every 5 hours because of the air strikes. There was one bucket for water and one bucket for waste. The doors opened, the dead were thrown out. And we continued.
Father made a bunker in the forests of Stara Lubovna, where 20 people from multiple families were hiding. It was snowing in October 1944, it was almost winter. And imagine, somebody gave away the location of this bunker. The Germans would never find it, it was well concealed. The Germans wouldn’t go into that forest by themselves, someone had to reveal the location. The soldier came and there was big skirmish and they killed father right away.
Oskar Winkler was born 29th April 1941 in Stara Lubovna into to family of Jozef Winkler and Anna Winkler, born Grundwald. Oskar’s Jewish heritage predetermined and influenced his life since early childhood. After the restoration of transports into concentration camps from Slovak People’s Republic in 1944, he went into hiding together with his parents into bunkers in woods around Stara Lubovna. But their hiding place was soon revealed. During this incident Jozef, the father of Oskar, was killed by German soldiers. The rest of the group, together with Oskar, was transported. Oskar, with his mother, got into the concentration camp in Bergen-Belsen. They have suffered a lot during their intervention in the camp. Anna succumbed to the typhus epidemic of Bergen-Belsen in 1945. Before her death, she asked her friend to bring his son back to Kosice, in hopes that someone from her family survived the horrors of the war. Oskar was taken care of by Helena, Anna’s older sister, until his adulthood. Helena was thinking of emigrating with Oskar from Czechoslovakia at the end of the 40ties. She couldn’t do so because of insufficient money. Oskar spent his student years in Kosice. After is studies he went to work to East-Slovakia metalworks, where he spent his whole productive life. Oskar is now retired and lives with his wife Agata in Kosice.
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