Agnes Weisbrun Hoffman (F / Hungary, 1931), Holocaust survivor
Agnes Weisbrun Hoffman (F / Hungary, 1931), Holocaust survivor
- KEYWORDS : <Hungary> <Auschwitz> <Death march> -- <Sweden> <United States>
Biography
Agnes Weisbrun (Weissbrunn, 21 Jan 1931) was born in Budapest, Hungary. Deported to Auschwitz and other camps. Liberated near Hamburg. Displaced child in Sweden. Emigrated to the United States.
USHMM Oral Interview
Agnes Weisbrun Hoffman, born in Budapest, Hungary on January 21, 1931, discusses her childhood in Miskolc, Hungary in a family of writers and actors; having many relatives in Ricse, Hungary, including her uncle, Adolph Zukor, the film mogul who immigrated to the United States and founded Paramount Pictures; living in a mixed neighborhood with three sisters; having non-Jewish school friends; working for her father in his movie theater; hearing from Austrian relatives of difficult times; how food became scarce; going into a shelter during bombings; how her father was taken away to a camp in Hungary and then to Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen; living in a brick factory for two weeks in June 1944; going with her sisters, mother, and grandmother in a cattle car to Auschwitz; being separated from them and how they did not survive; how a guard saved her because of her blonde hair and blue eyes; being sent to the showers; being given a long white summer dress, which she used in pieces in the latrine; living with 1200 women in a barrack; carrying bricks and becoming weak from a diet of coffee, green soup made from grass and dirt, and bread and jelly at night; being a messenger for the SS women because she spoke German; marching with no food to the Weiswasser ammunition factory (possibly in Gross-Rosen) with her friend, Blanca; living in a house with bunk beds and indoor plumbing; marching through the city to the factory in the early morning to straighten twisted wires for airplane parts; working in other factories, one of which was in a salt mine; still wearing the same dress though being dirty and having lice; being taken to Hamburg, Germany and not believing Hitler was dead and the war was over; going to Denmark and then to Sweden; staying in a hospital; going to a boarding school in Helsingborg, Sweden; waiting for five years until her relatives saw her name on a list; how they sent her a ticket to sail on the Queen Elizabeth to the United states; living with her relatives in New York, NY and having a job counting buttons; working for Scandinavian Airlines because she spoke Swedish; becoming a commodities broker in Chicago, IL; having four children; getting reparations; feeling she is more loving to people because of what she went through; and by chance meeting Blanca on the street in Chicago many years later.