Ibi Ginsburg
On 19 March 1944 Nazi Germans invaded Hungary. Immediately the Jewish population were ordered to wear yellow stars. Within a couple of weeks, the Jews were forced into ghettos. people were told to prepare food for a three day journey because they were being taken into Germany to work.
|
Ibi's family packed for the journey with no idea where they were being taken. They walked to a deserted station, they and thousands of other Jews were pushed into cattle wagons nothing other than buckets for water. They soon realised they were not heading towards Germany but Auschwitz Birkenau.
Ibi remembers being helped off of the wagons by men in striped uniforms and being made to wait in a queue with her family. Ibi's father was taken from the family first, then Ibi and her older sister Judith were led one way, and their mother and two younger sisters went in a different direction. Ibi later discovered that her mother and sisters had been taken immediately to the gas chambers and killed.
After three months Ibi and Judith were taken out of Auschwitz to work in a slave labour camp in Germany. Ibi says, "We were constantly hungry, humiliated, we worked, but we knew that the end was coming... We just hung on to life". Towards the end of the war, Ibi and Judith were taken on a forced march to a concentration camp, where they were finally liberated by Americans on 1 May 1945.
Ibi, Judith and her father survived the war. Ibi was taken into hospital until she was well enough. after she got out of hospital, began to work in hospital administration.Then she met Val who was recovering from his experiences in German slave labour camps. Val and Ibi soon got married, but neither of them wanted move back to their home countries, knowing that so many people they had deeply cared for had not survived. They got an invitation from Val's cousins, the Kagans, to move to England and work in their textile company, Kagan Textiles. They raised their two children in West Yorkshire and remained a loving couple for over 60 years.