Viktor Samko

Vik­tor Samko recalled that he sent a mes­sage to his par­ents to bring him food for the jour­ney;[1] he left the sta­tion at Jelša­va by train at eleven o’clock for the vil­lage of Plešivec, from there to Šafárikov (in 1992 renamed Tor­naľa) and to Miskolc (Miškovec), where he spent two days locked in a bar­racks. From Miškolc they took him to Budapest and even­tu­al­ly to Komárno where he spent maybe two and a half months in Csil­lag Bőrtényi.[2] He described how down below [in the fortress] they wad­ed up to their knees in mud and the guard walked above them. After that the Hun­gar­i­ans loaded them onto goods wag­ons and took them to Dachau con­cen­tra­tion camp [about 600 km as the crow flies]. Samko described the ter­ri­ble con­di­tions of their trans­port, when they had noth­ing to eat or drink and had to relieve them­selves by the wag­on doors. He drank his own urine. When at one stop they asked for water, some Ger­man or oth­er threw snow to them through the barred win­dow; Samko remem­bers that it at least quenched their thirst for a while. It was rain­ing when they arrived at Dachau and when they were dri­ven out of the wag­ons the first thing they did was to drink the water in the pud­dles. One Ger­man who knew Czech and Slo­vak reas­sured them that there was a good sup­per with tea wait­ing for them in the recep­tion build­ing, but instead of that they had their heads and the rest of their bod­ies shaved, and they had to wash in a bar­rel of ice cold water. Samko was giv­en striped pris­on­ers’ cloth­ing with a num­ber and the inscrip­tion PZ, mean­ing ​“par­ti­san”, on the back.

They were giv­en thin soup, and one loaf of bread for fif­teen men. Where­as the first day they were allowed to sleep until eight in the morn­ing, from the sec­ond day the wake-up call went at five o’clock and they walked about two kilo­me­tres to get to work in the aero­plane fac­to­ry. Samko remem­bers that no one was allowed to pause even for decond while they were work­ing or they would be beat­en imme­di­ate­ly, or killed on the spot. One elder­ly Jew­ish man who was not work­ing was hit on the head with a rifle butt by a Ger­man and died there and then. Samko faint­ed from fear, but his friends Don­go and Edo held him up and sup­port­ed him. A cart came for the dead body and took it to the crematorium.

Samko recount­ed one more sit­u­a­tion when he was saved by the pro­tec­tion of the Roma from Košice. He described how they were mak­ing aero­plane parts – what he called špáringy,[3] but he was tired and ill and so stopped work­ing and rest­ed. He didn’t notice the guard com­ing up behind him and was hit on the head from behind with a rifle butt. His feel­ing of futil­i­ty and dis­il­lu­sion made him want to throw him­self on the depart­ing guard and kill him, even if it meant he died him­self, but the oth­ers held him hack.

The hunger was so bad they searched the pock­ets of corpses to see if they had some­thing to eat on them. Samko found three or four pota­to peel­ings in the pock­et of one dead man. They weren’t good, and he spat them out, but at least he swal­lowed the juice from them to allay his hunger.

[1] The date is not given.

[2] Fort Csil­lag, or the Star Fortress, is part of the Danube bridge­head, which togeth­er with anoth­er 45 build­ings makes up the Komárno fortress system.

[3] Prob­a­bly Spren­gringe – cir­clips, also known as snap rings, or Seger rings.