Testimony about Forced Labor in Blaustauden near Laa by Joe S.
Following you have the opportunity to read two e-mails I received from Joe S., the son of a forced laborer at the Blaustauden farming estate near Laa, who contacted me after finding my web-page. They are documents of high importance and authenticity.
E-mail from March 24th 2010:
Dear Ms Müllner,
Thank you so much for your kind - and very prompt! reply. Here's what I know from my research and talking to family members.
I should start by saying that I only identified Blaustaudenhof recently. The last survivor of this group is my aunt Eva and she remembered the name as "Landerthal near Blaustaden, Austria". She doesn't like talking about this time, so I've had to piece it together by asking other relatives what they remember being told. I hope it answers your questions but please feel free to ask anything you like. I would be very happy to learn more about their time in Laa, if you discover anything.
My father was Janos Scheiner. He changed his name to John S. after migrating to Australia. He was the son of Tibor Scheiner and came from a small village about 130 km east of Budapest called Kunmadaras. I won't go into the history of Hungary's participation in the war, but around the 15th of May 1944 all the Jews of the area were rounded up and put into local ghettos. Most of the adult males including my father had already been sent to labor battalions. I suppose that my grandfather escaped the labor battalions because he was the town's physician.
After about a month the Jews were sent on to collection points. For the Jews from Kunmadaras, this was in a nearby town called Szolnok. After a couple of weeks in Szolnok the leaders of the new ghetto were told to divide the Jews into two groups, "A" and "B". Group "A" was community leaders, pharmacists, doctors and so forth, together with their their families. Group "B" was everyone else. I don't think anyone knew that group "B" was going to be exterminated, but there were certainly some people who fought to be in group "A" and survived because of this. The point of this exercise was that Eichmann was negotiating for the release of Jews in exchange for money or war materiel. He also needed slave laborers in Austria and surrounding areas. The plan was to put some families "on ice" while the negotiations were going on and simultaneously satisfy the need for labor. Group "A" was deported to Strasshof an der Nordbahn on June 26th. Group "B" left for Auschwitz on the 29th.
My grandfather had managed to put a group together which he kept with him - himself, his wife, his mother and mother-in-law, his sister-in-law and her young daughter, his cousin's wife and her young son. From Strasshof they were sent to Laa an der Thaya near the Czech border. There was at least some choice of work detail, and my grandfather elected to work on a farm. It turned out to be a wise decision, as his entire group survived. The farm's name may have been Blaustaudenhof, or that may be the area the farm was in.
Towards the end of the war they were marched north to Theresienstadt. There were two old ladies in the group and the farmer lent them a horse and cart (I found this hard to believe, but I have been assured that it's true). The other survivors they met were amazed to see old women - they thought they had all been killed. A relative told me that the two children of the party were among only ninety-three to be liberated from Theresienstadt.
The group consisted of:
My grandfather Dr Tibor Scheiner, born 12 Apr 1888.
His wife Iren Scheiner (nee Ernst) born 1897.
His mother Irma Scheiner (nee Kun or Kohn) born 7 Dec 1860.
His mother-in-law Hermina Scheiner (nee Farkas) born 1875.
His sister-in-law Piri Ernst (nee Wohl) born 1910.
Her daughter, his niece Eva Ernst born 1935.
His cousin's wife Klara Kun (nee Fischer) born 1911.
Her son, Ferenc Kun born 13 Jul 1937 All the best, Joe S.
Part of e-mail from March 25th 2010:
I don't know if the party lived in Blaustadenhof or just worked there. I'm reluctant to press my aunt Eva too much because these memories are very painful for her. I'll try to find out through other relatives who heard the stories.
I don't know if people confused Hungarians with Poles, but the Hungarians definitely arrived in Austria after June 1944. This deportation was unlike all earlier deportations of Hungarian Jews: those ones ended up in death camps, but around 20,000 people deported in June 1944 were deliberately kept as survivors. So if the other laborers arrived in 1943 they were probably not Hungarian, although they might have been from parts of Romania that had been conquered by Hungary.
I'm afraid I don't know much about their daily life - I'll have to ask my other relatives for this information too. From what Eva told me the decision to go to the countryside was made at Strasshof, and another relative (Miklos Ernst) decided to go to a work battalion in the city (Vienna?) instead. He died of typhus before the end of the war. So there was some choice of assignment - and I am told that my grandfather was a very charming, very clever, very persuasive man.
Here's a funny story about him that I recently discovered:
My grandfather was in the Austro-Hungarian army in the First World War. He was captured by the Russians, and wanted to communicate with his family. Now, he was a Hungarian who was sending a postcard to other Hungarians. I have the postcard - it's written in German! And it's not addressed to a close relative, but to his brother's father-in-law. After someone translated the card for me I understood everything. Everything a prisoner-of-war writes is read by a military censor. So sending a message to your family is also sending a message to your captors. My grandfather's relative was Adolf Fürst from Bátor keszi, and this is how my uncle addressed his letter:
"Herr Hochwohlgeboren (= your highness)
Fürst Grundbesitzer (= Count Countryowner)
Bátor keszi,
Lieber Onkel, (= Dear Uncle) [...]"
So he was not only telling his family where he was, he was also cleverly implying (quite falsely) that he was the nephew of a prince, in a letter that would be read by his captors. I hope he was treated better after this!