József Forgács
József Forgács was born in Zalaegerszeg, a town in the west of Hungary, on 22 April 1935. His father earned his living as a wagoner and had his own horse and cart. József had three sisters and two brothers and they lived on a small farm. In March 1944 German troops occupied Hungary and the fascist Arrow Cross came to power in October 1944. As the Red Army approached, Hungarian Jews and Hungarian Roma were persecuted on a huge scale. They were arrested and taken to work camps and concentration and extermination camps. They were only persecuted for a short time, but it was effective, violent and extremely cruel.
It was the turn of the Roma from Zalaegerszeg at the beginning of November 1944. More than 1,000 Roma were arrested in a raid and were transported in cattle trucks to Fort Csillag in Komárom, in the north of Hungary. József and his family were among them. First, everyone in the fort was shaved completely bald, many people fell ill and there was hardly any food. After a week, all males over the age of 15 were deported, including József's father. He was probably deported to Auschwitz and killed there.
József was transported to the west (Austria, Germany) along with many other young Hungarian Roma. He ended up in a concentration camp complex with annexed camps where he had to carry out forced labor. József never found out exactly which camp complex he was sent to. He thinks that it was Mauthausen, but it is also known that many Hungarian Roma were transported to the large Dachau camp complex in Bavaria in the last months of the war.
In the camp József was only given one meal a day for months on end: either dry bread or something vaguely resembling soup. The work was tough, cleaning the buildings, and many prisoners died of hunger or disease. In April the camp was liberated by Soviet troops. Together with a few other Roma children, József tried to find his way back home on foot. The journey was hundreds of kilometers long, and they walked back, begging for food and sleeping in the fields under the open sky. When he reached Sopron, the first town after the border between Austria and Hungary, he looked terrible, but he knew that he was close to home. When he got back to Zalaegerszeg he found that his parental home had been totally destroyed and concluded that his father was probably no longer alive.
As everything had been destroyed or lost, József had to start all over again. Not only had he lost his father, but the horse and the carriage were gone too. József and his sisters and brothers who also survived the war, had to beg to stay alive. When he was twenty, he was called up for military service and became a border guard. He was still a soldier – though against his will – during the Hungarian uprising in 1956. He finally left the army when his first child was born, and he got a job at a Hungarian construction company. Later he became a foreman in a furniture factory in Zalaegerszeg, where he continued to work until he retired.
Every year a commemoration is held in Zalaegerszeg on the third of November, in memory of the deportations in 1944, and József has often participated. Tens of thousands of Hungarian Roma were killed during the war; it is generally estimated that the number of deaths amounted to 28,000. József never received any form of financial compensation for what he and his family suffered. He never found out exactly what happened to his father. In 2014 he went on a memorial trip to Auschwitz, where he shared his story with hundreds of young people, both Roma and non-Roma.
