John Chillag
John Chillag
Born: 1927
Place of Birth: Vienna
Arrived in Britain: 06/12/2025
Interview Number: 38 (N)
Interview Summary
Date of interview: 13/11/2003
John Chillag was born in Vienna on 20 April 1927 to a Hungarian father and an Austro-Hungarian mother. He was an only child. He had a Liberal Jewish upbringing, although his mother came from a more orthodox family. His father was an accountant and his mother a dressmaker. The family lived in the 18th district near the Turkenschantz Park and then in the 2nd district in the Ausstellung Strasse. At the age of 7 the family returned to Gyor, Hungary, where his father was born and his father went into the family’s building material company as the accountant. John attended a Jewish primary school and a State Secondary School and joined in after school activities. His father was politically active on the left. In 1938 his father was taken to join a labour battalion but was not conscripted in subsequent years because he was beyond the age. There were certain anti-Jewish restrictions but these did not affect his family at this time.
The Germans overran the country in 1944 and within two weeks had implemented many anti-Jewish restrictions. Work and school ceased and the Jews were forced into a ghetto in the Jewish section of town. They were there for about 2 weeks in the house of a non-Jewish worker who swapped homes with them. They were then moved to a regional ghetto by the railway and were transported in June in cattle trucks to Auschwitz. They did not know of this place and had no idea what it meant. John, his father and uncle were selected for work, the women were not. He soon discovered what had happened to them. They were placed in a barrack near the gypsy camp and spent about 2 months there in quarantine due to an outbreak of illness. They spent their days in roll calls and in idling away their time. He heard the commotion as the gypsy camp was broken up. In August they were finally sent to the slave labour camp of Bochum, a satellite of Buchenwald. John worked in the steel works, pressing ship’s cannons under great heat without any protective clothing. His father was with him but died in the winter of exhaustion.
In March 1945 they were taken to Buchenwald where John went to the hospital wing, being too weak to do anything. He was liberated there by the Americans in April 1945 and nursed back to health in an army hospital. He returned to Gyor and re-opened the family building material company with a cousin. He managed to purchase goods with money he found in Buchenwald. They bribed the Russians to leave the family home with 44 gallons of methalated spirits. The business was successful but in 1949 he was conscripted into the army. He took leave and fled the country for Vienna. There he became registered as a refugee with the IRO and after stays in various DP camps he sailed for Australia on the General MB Steward US Navy Ship in Feb. 1950. He was given a job in the ship’s office because he could speak English slightly and shared a two berth room and better food. He worked in Sydney then took a job in the Snowy Mountains on the Hydro Electric Scheme. There he met his future wife a London born girl called Audrey Banham.
Place of Birth
In Britain people know Bergen-Belsen, Dimbleby and all that, but Buchenwald was liberated about a fortnight before that, and it was the first camp. Nobody had any idea what the camps were like. And there were these young American GI Joes they didn't know what to do, they didn't know what to expect. They went to their pockets: cigarettes, chewing gum, Hershey bar, bully beef, whatever they had in their pockets. And the prisoners on the bunks they were reaching out trying to get some of these goodies. And of course it wasn't the sort of food or material that in our condition survived on. I was too weak to reach out for anything and that probably saved my life.
Liberation of Buchenwald
The food wasn't all that much, was it, but one thing one has to remember about those times, that in Hungary we were living very well. There were no food shortages, or no real food shortages. So we had quite a bit of what I refer to as ‘tactical reserve’ on us, but in Auschwitz it was very rapidly disappearing.
losing fat in Auschwitz
Well, one was sort of playing mental games, anything from chess in your head to Bar Kochba or mental scribble, scrabble, or that sort of thing, or telling jokes, Jewish jokes, other jokes, or whatever, or anything, there wasn't much else to do. Except during the first fortnight we had one so to say job to do, send a postcard. And that wasn't from Auschwitz, but from some lakeside name, 'we are here, we are OK, the weather is good and the food is wonderful’, and that sort of thing. No I don’t think it said the food was wonderful, but... and just send the postcard like you would send from Ibiza or... We sent it to one of our tradesmen in Györ and afterwards we found out it actually got there, saying how wonderful life was in, not Auschwitz but wherever. But apart from that, just milling around during the day between the two roll-calls, and of course the two roll calls took up three quarters of the day anyway.
Life in Auschwitz
I was working on a very large steel forging press operating at 1000 degrees centigrade, very noisy, and worked with no protective clothing, which meant that lots of people got injured, even killed, working on that. And then after the twelve hour shift was over, another half an hour march to the barracks, and another shortish roll-call and then just fell half-dead or three-quarter dead into our bunk until the next shift started.
The steel press, Bochumer Verein
Hungary had two types of police. Police in the more sort of urban areas, and Gendarmerie in the countryside, open areas and so on. And whilst the Police was no better, no worse than the rest of the population, the Gendarmerie were sort of hand-picked yobbos and thugs with sympathies as far right as Hitler, possibly further. And if anything we suffered more from even the limited contact we had with them, than from the Germans, at that stage.
hungarian police worse than germans
And there was one other lad, much the same age as myself, a German Jew, who done this Riga-Buchenwald-Rhine journey, and he was operating the cranes that serviced the press. We, I knew that if I would be able to be in the camp hospital for a few days it would make life a little bit easier, and we conspired that he let down the cradle of the crane very slowly onto my toe, and for that I would be having to go to the hospital and stay a few days until the blue has disappeared. Well, the load was heavier than anticipated, so it not just quashed it but actually broke it. So I had my leg in plaster for about a fortnight and I was in hospital, and that probably saved my life.
Broken toe, Bochumer Verein
When I was seventeen, one year to go to matriculation, the Germans occupied Hungary, so I never went to the last class before graduating from school. …All the anti-Jewish legislation they put into practise in Germany over years, and in less and less time as they occupied various countries, and by the time they got to Hungary, it worked like clockwork.
nazis perfecting their system
One or two people did escape. One of them was a local Jew from that area who done a round the world journey before he got back to Bochum and he did escape. And I found out only last year that he actually died just a few months before I tried to contact him. But because he escaped, there was punishment meted out, and I don't know, 50 people got executed for it. So he was regarded by the only other survivor I know as a villain of the piece, because those 50 would have possibly been still alive if he wouldn't have escaped. Now whether that is so, who can tell now? And incidentally these three people, myself, the man who escaped and one other person are the only survivors of 1360 people in that group of the camp.
Price of escape, Bochumer Verein
Our foreman kicked us quite a lot, called us all sorts of names, every blue moon he brought in a newspaper bag, or just a newspaper wrapping of potato peels: 'Here, Jews, that's something to eat'. And it served a double purpose. It's quite delicious, potato peelings, in those circumstances, it also gave you a chance to look at the local newspapers, Bergische Arbeiter or whatever. Now one didn't expect to find anything in it that would have been earth-shattering, but one could read the headline: 'Last night in the terror attack by the RAF or the Americans, the glorious Luftwaffe shot down a thousand airplanes'. One would have thought that there were at least a thousand airplanes in the attack, so you put two and two together, which was a bit encouraging.
Reading newspapers in Bochumer Verein