Testimony of Eliezer Andor Bass Ben-Shachar, born in Budapest, Hungary, 1924, regarding his experiences in labor battalions and in Budapest

Testimony of Eliezer Andor Bass Ben-Shachar, born in Budapest, Hungary, 1924, regarding his experiences in labor battalions and in Budapest Poor, religious family; only son after the death of his younger brother; his father was a second lieutenant in World War I and worked as a clerk; his mother was a clerk until her marriage; attends a Jewish school, which was also a rabbinical seminary, until the end of high school. German occupation of Budapest; unsuccessful escape attempts; draft to a labor battalion in Jaszbereny; his unit serves Hungarian Army warehouses, May 1944; labor clearing rubble; Allied air-raids, burning buildings, and corpses; draft of his father and his death from disease; deserts the army; return to Budapest, mid-October 1944; in hiding with a friend using a forged Swiss protective passport; entry into the ghetto to his mother's apartment with her friends due to cold and hunger, December 1944; air-raids; liberation of the ghetto by the Red Army. Joins a group of youths with the goal of making aliya to Eretz Israel, mid-February; stay in Szeged and Kecskemet; travel on a Soviet train which crosses the Yugoslavian-Romanian border with help from a Jewish Red Army officer; stay in Timisoara under auspices of the Joint; work in Bucharest as a lens polisher; sets sail and aliya to Eretz Israel, 1945; absorption in Kibbutz Matzuva.