Testimony of Chaim Yosef Yechiel Shenfeld, born in 1928 in Mukacevo, Czechoslovakia, about his experiences in Auschwitz-Birkenau, Magdeburg, Buchenwald, and additional camps in 1944–1945

Testimony of Chaim Yosef Yechiel Shenfeld, born in 1928 in Mukacevo, Czechoslovakia, about his experiences in Auschwitz-Birkenau, Magdeburg, Buchenwald, and additional camps in 1944–1945 Childhood in a religious family; family owns textile shops; family life; family moves to Kosice; father holds Polish citizenship; persecution of foreign nationals in Slovakia; family forced to leave; moves to Subotica in 1934; witness attends a Serbian school; family opens a textile shop and a fish shop; Hungarian forces invade in 1941; foreign nationals exelled to Ukraine and drafted into labor brigades; antisemitic manifestations among Hungarians against the Jewish population; life continues under Hungarian rule until 1944; German forces invade in 1944; Jewish population rounded up in open area near Subotica central train station; sent on to the gendarmerie station; sent to a camp near Subotica and held there for a month; living conditions in the camp; deportation to Auschwitz-Birkenau; selection; entering the camp; life in the camp; sent on to Buchenwald; better conditions; approx. one week in the camp; transferred to Magdeburg; clears rubble as a forced laborer for approx. half a year; reassigned to digging antitank trenches in Weimar; front closes in; camp evacuated; witness escapes from a death march; wanders; survival; mortal danger; liberation; hospitalized due to exhaustion; Ukrainian guards suspect witness of being a spy; witness placed in jail; doctor acquaintance testifies that witness is not a spy; witness released from detention. Testimony continues. Attached: another interview with the witness about the same events and his life during the war, conducted approx. four years later on April 20, 2017; this interview, too, did not end.