Mrs. Mindu Hornick attributes her unlikely survival to, “Miracles, only miracles”

As told to Riki Goldstein by Mrs. Mindu Hornick

Mindu was 13 years old when she was deported to Auschwitz. Ultimately, she survived a ghetto, a concentration camp, a slave labor camp, a Death March, and a train bombing, and rebuilt her life in England after the war. She attributes her unlikely survival to, in her words, “Miracles, only miracles”

I attribute my survival of the Holocaust to a thousand miracles. How else is it possible that a slim, sheltered 13-year-old Jewish girl lived through the torture of life in Auschwitz and survived as a slave laborer under demonic overseers? Miracles, only miracles. And I attribute what I have managed in the rest of my life to the strength I gained in the concentration camps. When you have been through that as a youngster, you learn to do whatever you need to do to survive.

Before the War Began

I

was born in a very small Jewish community called Vermeziv, in Czechoslovakia. It was very Orthodox, very frum. We baked challos at home on Friday, and since we had an oven, all the neighbors would put their cholent there and come collect it on Shabbos morning after shul.

Until World War I, Vermeziv was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Post World War I, we were absorbed into Czechoslovakia, and in 1939, once invaded by Germany, the Germans gave our area back to Hungarian Regent Miklos Horthy.

When you live on such a volatile border, you get accustomed to learning new languages. In my case, I spoke German, Czech, and Slovak, and once our area was annexed to Hungary, I learned Hungarian in school. Later, in the concentration camps, my Hungarian was the one thing that blossomed, as there were lots of Hungarian girls there.

Horthy cooperated with the German Reich. Within a year of becoming part of Hungary, all the Jewish men of Vermeziv were gone. They were recruited to labor battalions, sent ahead of the Germans to dig trenches and load trucks. So my father, a wood and hay merchant, was taken away, wearing an armband with the star of David, forced to wield a shovel for the Germans.

I was 12-and-a-half when he left us, and I had an older sister and two little brothers. My mother must have been very resourceful because she somehow was able to feed us. We had a lovely home with a vegetable garden and an orchard, and she bartered our produce to get flour to bake bread and challah.

A year later, in 1942, they cleared out all the Jews of our town, except for eight families. We watched in horror as our friends and neighbors, and my grandparents, were loaded onto open trucks in the town center. Horthy had some say in these deportations, and apparently at his order, those families who had a member in the military were left behind. The trucks drove off to Galicia. We heard later that the Jews were ordered to undress, dig trenches, and were shot.

It was a miracle that we were left untouched, at home, at that time. But still, it was very frightening and isolating. Our father was taken away, our little town almost deserted, and our own fate unknown. The gentile neighbors, who we’d had good relationships with, were suddenly hostile.