Ernest Halpert was born in 1923 in Mukacheve, which was then under Czechoslovak rule. His father was a shopkeeper and Halpert grew up with two sisters. Halpert attended a private religious school until his bar mitzvah and then worked at a factory until the outbreak of World War II. When Mukacheve was occupied by the Germans in 1944, he was deported to Austria, where he was imprisoned in several camps as forced laborer. In March 1945, Halpert was drafted into the Red Army. During the postwar Soviet era, Halpert worked as engineer at a factory and raised two children.
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Ernest describes in this clip the fate for the majority of Jews from Transcarpathia during World War II. After Passover 1944, all Jews that were assembled from villages and other towns in ghettos of major Transcarpathian towns a month or so prior, were deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp.
By undergoing the same fatal processes of the Holocaust, they joined the destiny of the majority of Eastern European Jews in Auschwitz. It is beyond human imagination, particularly for the younger generations, how Ernest and other Nazi camp survivors are capable of talking about "the hard years" and reflecting on the horrors of Auschwitz. Ernest, like so many others, came to witness the inhumanity that "Auschwitz" represents. Survivors narrate their experiences of Joseph Mengele's selection processes, while smelling burned flesh and seeing smoke coming out of the camp's chimneys.