Tomáš Lang

* 1942

  • "By seven o'clock we already knew, I think it was my mother-in-law who came running, that they had occupied us. And everybody went to their workplace, but mentally, mentally we were disheveled from that. That's terrible. The square was full of Hungarian tanks and soldiers, and they were wondering why the audience was speaking to them in Hungarian. They didn't know where they were. Just like the Soviet soldiers in Trnava, they claimed they were in Germany. They thought they were going to smash imperialism. Just like today in Ukraine they believed they were going to fight the Nazis. That is a topic in itself. So we bitterly struggled our way through that square and went to the workplace. There already, who came, quite nervous, in a distressed state of mind. And then also from all the businesses, people got organized and went in a crowd and with flags towards the main square, which got a little bit loose, a little bit clogged up. And they were talking to these people. They were perplexed from it. When we were coming back, you have to cross the bridge there to get to that Elektrosvit. On this side, on the right bank right by the bridge was the hospital, on the left bank was this Elektrosvit. And as we were walking along, I saw that there was a Hungarian soldier with a machine gun lying buried at the head of the bridge. He's aiming at the hospital, and his overalls are peeking out from under the army rags. They have taken them from the workplace. They pulled the summer military rags on it and so they took them. They didn't know where they were. So we talked to him. Again, that's a personal experience. -Where are you going? -There. - I said, do you know what this is? It's a hospital. Is that where you're looking for the enemy? You're aiming for the hospital here? - No, I'm not. There. - I'm saying - and you know where you're headed now? The morgue. I say - that's where your enemies are."

  • "Because that kind of latent anti-Semitism, or simply showing that you are something different, was also common at the gymnasium. I had an enormous, enormous problem one time in that grammar school when my father had to go to the school inspectorate - there was a district school inspectorate at the District National Committee at that time - to protest and to demand a solution because, it's not a self-praise, I was an excellent pupil all the way through the line. Not as eminent as my later wife, but I was eminent. And what goes with that, I was not that good at physical education. And the PE teacher, who was a displaced Slovak from Békéscsaba, whom I recently found on the list of names of the displaced people who came in that population exchange, scolded me with words like, 'You're just for learning, not for exercising." Well, I'll translate it into plain language, who is this you, because he was using the plural form of you. So it must have been something more. And I already knew who the you were that he was singling out and saying they were for learning but not for gymnastics. Come on, I couldn't skip meter forty. And it was a stretch at the school inspectorate. This gentleman, his name was Jan Krasko, was invited. What they told him, I don't know. He didn't reproach me afterwards, but he didn't forgive me for anything. So if he could, he would have had me flunked out of gym class too."

  • "Around that lake on one side is the town of Ravensbrück, on the other side is the concentration camp that the Nazis built as the first specialised concentration camp for women. I stayed there after a long journey. 'I'm not going there today, I'm going there tomorrow, I've got to prepare for that.' And when I look out of that little hotel at that water and I see that there it is. I knew by the map that I was supposed to go there. I had all kinds of feelings and the next morning I went to the other side of that lake. And there I see: administrative building, accommodation, outdoor such pavilions for accommodation. Then it dawned on me, when I was there, that there were SS men living there, and then for 40 years there were former officers of the Soviet army living there. I turned around, looking back. At the city. And I didn't have the mental strength to enter that camp. Not that I got there, knock, shake, ring the bell, and here I am. No. It affects a person tremendously deeply and emotionally. And on the bank under the trees there were such resting benches. I sat down on one of those benches, I remained seated there for about two hours and contemplated the fact that here, behind my back, has been a camp since '34. Right when Dachau was established, at the same time Ravensbrück was established as a women's only camp. And there's a small town, quite decent people are there, lived there, their ancestors lived there. With what feelings those people could live here, there in that town, when they knew on this other bank what was going on. Because there was a women's camp and there was a youth camp adjacent quite close to it - especially, for the youth, a children's camp. An inhumane insane thing. Sort of just an absolute collapse of humanism, which was all realised there. I couldn't decipher this riddle. After two hours I was like, 'I'm going to go find out,' so I stayed there for about three days."

  • Celé nahrávky
  • 1

    Bratislava, 24.05.2022

    (audio)
    délka: 03:26:31
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of the 20th century
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

The victims of the Holocaust are not victims of the Second World War, but they are victims of the mass murder of the civilian population, which could only have happened under the guise of a war turmoil

Witness - Tomáš Lang
Witness - Tomáš Lang
zdroj: Post Bellum SK

Tomáš Lang was born on 9 May 1942 in Budapest to parents of Jewish origin, Alexander Frankfurter and Hermine, nee. Lang. He lost both parents and his maternal and paternal grandparents during World War II. After the war, his mother‘s sister, Aranka, took him from the hospital where he had been hospitalized during the deportation of Jews from Hungary because of otitis media. In 1947, he was adopted by his mother‘s brother Alexander and his wife Helena, moved from Budapest to Nové Zámky, and his surname was changed to Lang. Alexander was interned in a camp in Nováky after being accused of trading on the black market. He attended primary and secondary school in Nové Zámky from 1948 to 1959. His school days were accompanied by displays of antisemitism not only from his peers but also from his teachers. After graduating from grammar school, he studied at a faculty in Brno and wanted to become a car designer. In his final year, he transferred to university in Prague, where he worked on machine tools, and at the same time began working at the Elektrosvit plant in Nové Zámky in the lighting wiring department. In 1966 he came up with the idea of introducing computers into the factory. Subsequently, he studied economics from 1965 to 1968, and later he completed the CSc (Candidate of Sciences degree) in Mathematics. Shortly before the Russian invasion, he left Elektrosvit and from 1 July 1968 worked in Bratislava at the Welding Research Institute. In 1969 and 1970 he worked as the head of the branch of the Research Institute of Metal Industry Prešov in Nové Zámky. When after December 1970 Nové Zámky became independent from the Prague Engineering and the Research Institute of Tools VUNAR was established, he worked at this workplace as director until September 1989, when he failed in the election for director. He is currently engaged in publishing books on the Holocaust and the history of Judaism in southern Slovakia.