Betty Deutsch

Born in Hungary, Betty Deutsch survived the Auschwitz-Birkenau and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps in Poland and Germany during World War II. Betty arrived in the United States in 1950, after spending five years in Sweden. She and her sister came to the west end of Bridgeport, where some relatives lived and had a bakery. 

When the Jews from her town were rounded up to go to the ghetto: 

I just couldn’t go away without saying good-bye to the animals. I had to go into the stable, and touch every one of the cows, the horses, you know--   We had chickens, dogs, all those stuff, and you can imagine what we felt. To leave everything behind us, you know. We had beautiful furniture, whatever we had, we had to leave. We never knew what happened to what. And then Monday morning all the Jewish people were walking to the synagogue, and everyone was there, and we had to walk to the railroad station.

In the spring of 1945, she and her sister were put in a cattle car along with other prisoners from the Berndorf camp:

As the train was going we heard bombing, we heard shooting, that train was dancing on the tracks. And the train—nobody opened the door ever, to see what’s happening to us, and many, many, many girls died right there in front of us, and after so many days finally the train stopped. They opened the door, we see a forest, they made us go out, and they told us five in a row, we had to be, and then we saw a machine gun was all around us. The German shepherd dog was there, so nobody could run away—not because we wanted to, we were so afraid from those German SS men, and then they made us lay down on the ground. My sister said to me –I was so tight next to her—we should say the prayer, I should say it after her. And I did. And then the airplane—we saw the SS men is running away, with their dogs. We had no idea why, and then—we were all alone! So what we supposed to do? We didn’t even move from the ground, you know? We were just laying there, ‘til we heard some truckloads of soldiers came, and motorcycles, and they came to us, and they told us that the war was over.  

We never ever thought of being free, and that was May 2, 1945. You could imagine, we didn’t know what to do—cry! laugh! We were thinking of our family. Nobody’s here, as far as I know, they all went to the crematorium. And after that they cleaned out the cattle cars. They put in just so many people-- they took us to a regular station. They put us into a regular train, and we were taken to Denmark.   

Starting a new life in the United States: 

It was very, very hard. We had to start a new life again. It wasn’t easy, not at all, but we tried to make the best of it. It was a beautiful country, and we came here to stay. And we had to go out and work to survive. […] So it was hard—the beginning. Then we started to learn English [...] we went to night school and I had to learn from the book. 

On telling her story about the Holocaust: 

When I went to Israel in 1981 with my sister, for the Holocaust gathering from all over the world, you never, ever saw anything like it. And the last night, it was by the Wailing Wall—six thousand survivors, and six thousand memorial candles burning, and over there the people, the lead survivors in Israel and everybody in Israel, the President, he talked to us. "When you go back to your country, please go to school, tell the children, tell your friends, tell everyone what the Jewish people went through." And you know what, when I came back, my heart opened up, and I started to go to schools.