Free Four Scraps of Bread by Anthony T.; Magda; Fuller Hollander-Lafon

wash. The group was then taken to a so-called transit camp, almost certainlywithin Dora or one of the other camps of the complex.
    After three weeks in this displaced persons camp, Magda and her four compatriots—not one of them wishing to return to Hungary, where no one was waiting for them—managed to board a train they believed was heading to France, the country that in their minds was the land of their freedom. However, they got off the train in Namur, a major city in the French-speaking part of Belgium, drawn by the smell of bread and by the reception that resistance fighters were enjoying there. Once they were identified as Jewish, they were given to an American rabbi, probably from the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and Refugee Aid organization. Suffering from tuberculosis, Magda was treated in the town’s hospital. The rabbi then made a house available to the five survivors. Magda stayed there from May to September 1945.
    She studied to become a childhood educator and learned French. For almost ten years she lived and worked in Belgium, and was subjected to regular inquiries by the immigration police, with whom she had to renew her claim for a residence permit many times.
    Magda is the only survivor from her family, and one of the few from her home town or, more broadly, the Hungarian Jewish community: in 46 days and 147 convoys, 437,403 people were deported. Of them, 350,000 were murdered on arrival at Auschwitz-Birkenau …

NOTES
    Notes to the Text
    1. Auschwitz was one of the Nazis’ principal concentration camps. The complex was located in an occupied area of Poland, and approximately 1.1 million prisoners—90 percent of them Jewish—were killed there starting in September 1941.
    2. Ravensbrück was a women’s concentration camp located just over 50 miles north of Berlin. Approximately 50,000 prisoners, out of at least 130,000 who passed through the camp at some point during World War II, died there.
    3. This is a reference to the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp, which was established in 1943 to provide labor for a munitions factory on the outskirts of Nordhausen, a city in central Germany, approximately half way between Berlin and Cologne.
    4. Zillertal, near Erdmannsdorf in southwestern Poland, was one of the Gross-Rosen concentration camps.
    5. The Schutzstaffel , or “defense corps,” was an elite Nazi paramilitary organization.
    6. Birkenau was one of the main elements of the Auschwitz complex. It was a combined concentration/extermination camp.
    7. Bischofferode is a city in central Germany, west of Nordhausen.
    8. Namur is a large city in southern Belgium, the capital of the French-speaking area.
    9. The Paths of Time was published in 1977 by Éditions ouvrières, with a preface by Roger Ikor. This new version has been revised and corrected by the author.
    10. Darquier de Pellepoix was commissioner for Jewish affairs in the pro-Nazi collaborationist government of Vichy France. He made these comments in a notorious interview given to L’Express magazine in 1978.
    Notes to the Historical Note
    11. Only the SS camp physicians ( Lagerärzte ) were authorized to oversee the selection process, which they referred to as “platform service.” Joseph Mengele, SS physician for the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp, frequently carried out the selection, sorting the Häftlinge (fit for work) from the non- Häftlinge . He was also guilty of numerous pseudomedical experiments.
    12. The most senior resident of the block.
    13. Groups of detainees responsible for operating the crematoria and destined to be put to death.
    14. Walldorf was one of the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camps. It operated in late 1944.
    15. The Schmelt organization was a network of 177 labor camps in western Poland. Conditions were less extreme there than in other camps, but the organization was absorbed by Auschwitz and Gross-Rosen in 1943.
    16. Gablonz was one of the