“At 13 through hell” – that’s the name of his book. It was published in 2019 and the title sums up what happened to Dachau survivor Peter Johann Gardosch quite well. The now 91-year-old Jew from Transylvania was deported from Hungary in May 1944 and deported to Kaufering-III, part of the large Kaufering subcamp complex of the Dachau concentration camp. Jewish prisoners were forced there under inhuman conditions to build aircraft parts.
Gardosch spoke about his experiences at a contemporary witness interview that the concentration camp memorial organized and broadcast live on YouTube. The director of the memorial, Gabriele Hammermann, moderated the conversation and the 40 or so viewers were able to ask questions using the comment function. The recorded video can still be seen on the memorial’s YouTube channel.
Gardosch was born on November 8, 1930 in Neumarkt am Mieresch, in the Transylvania region, which at that time still belonged to Hungary. He was 13 years old when the German Wehrmacht invaded Hungary in March 1944 and was arrested with his family in May of the same year. Shortly before, his mother had turned down an offer to hide in the hunting lodge of a family friend: “Germany is a civilized country,” she said, says Gardosch. She thought they had to work on a farm in Germany. First the family was transported by Hungarian soldiers to a brick factory, then on a train to Auschwitz.
“This ride was a horror”
70 to 80 people crowded into a single wagon. They had to share a bucket of water and another to relieve themselves. “This trip was a horror,” says Gardosch. When they arrived in Auschwitz, the prisoners were divided into men and women, old people and children. The last thing the Gardosch saw of his mother, grandmother and younger sister was the straw hat his mother had woven for field work on the way. They were instantly murdered by gas. Gardosch himself wore a coat that was too large during the selection and made himself a few years older. That was the only reason why he survived.
He and his father were in the extermination camp at Auschwitz for 19 days. Every morning at roll call one of the guards yelled: “Jews! Who is reporting for work?” It was rumored that anyone who answered would be gassed straight away. The rations the inmates received were so low in calories that they would starve to death within a month. So father and son decided to take the risk: They reported for work and were taken to Kaufering-III. There an SS man chose Gardosch as his assistant because the boy spoke German. The fact that he took on lighter work because of it also saved his life: “The work on the construction site with these huge airplanes, the steel, the concrete – I would not have survived that as a teenager.”
Shortly before the end of the war, the prisoners were sent on a death march to Allach. Gardosch and his father were able to escape. The father, three of his friends and he had managed to persuade two SS men to flee with them. “They also knew that the war was over.” There was an accident, a truck accidentally sped into the column at night. Panic broke out and the seven men managed to run away. For a while they hid in a wooded cave near Puch. A local pastor later provided them with bread and water. But the pastor could not hide the group. Instead, he sent her to a monastery in Fürstenfeldbruck.
On the way there they met American soldiers who declared that the war was over. They had a bottle of champagne with them, beheaded with the bayonet, says Gardosch. One of them was looking for relatives, “the others looked like John Wayne”. For a short time they were accommodated in the monastery with Father Emmanuel Heiss, a “wonderful person”, as Gardosch describes him. Then father and son received the papers from the American occupiers to finally return home. Gardosch’s uncle, a lawyer who had served in World War I and was considered a hero, had taken care of her belongings. According to Gardosch, he himself was too prominent to be arrested.
“I was in contact with Albert Speer”
But everything did not turn out for the better when I returned home. Anti-Semitism was still widespread and, according to Gardosch, still is today. At the time he came back with a “degree of naivety”, believing that what he had been through would be recognized. The boy who was in Auschwitz. Instead, he went back to school. “To put it in ordinary terms,” says Gardosch, “no pig” was interested in what he went through. That has hardly changed until today. “When you take a taxi through Budapest today, one of the taxi drivers explains to one of the taxi drivers that the Jews rule the world and Rothschild sells Hungarians.”
After leaving school, Gardosch only worked in the radio in his home country and emigrated to Israel in 1963. Then he went to Germany, studied and became a management consultant. It wasn’t until late that he was able to talk about the horrors of his childhood. In the meantime, he has published two books: “The reparation” (2011) and “At 13 through hell” (2019).
Finally, Gardosch tells of an unexpected anecdote: “You won’t believe it: I was in contact with Albert Speer.” After his release from prison in 1966, Hitler’s former armaments minister unscrupulously tried to whitewash his crimes. He wrote books and enjoyed giving interviews. Gardosch remembers a TV round in which Speer took part. He knew the presenter of the show and was able to establish contact with Speer through him. Gardosch says he called Speer and asked how he could support Hitler at the time. Speer’s answer was simple. According to Gardosch, he said: “I was 30 years old and had the opportunity to come into contact with the most powerful man in Europe. It’s hard to say no.”