Vilk Hodinger grew up with five siblings, of whom three perished in Auschwitz. He attended cheder in Vynohradiv from the ages 6 to 15, as well as Czech and Hungarian schools. His father, who worked as laborer, was born in Ilnytsya and his mother came from Pryslip. During World War II, he survived the selection at Auschwitz, where he was deported from the Vynohradiv ghetto in May 1944. He was liberated from the Furstenfeldbruck forced labor camp, where he fixed airplanes for several months. Between 1949 and 1953, he served in the Soviet military. He worked odd jobs before his draft and then sold ice-cream for thirty years.
Other Interviews:
A Few Pengos"Hitler ate up our youth"
Vynohradiv Ghetto
Berehove, Ukraine
In this clip, Vilk Hodiger talks about imprisonment in the Vynohradiv (Selish) ghetto during World War II.
When the Germans occupied Hungary in March 1944--"after Passover," as Hodiger puts it-- they immediately set up ghettos for the Jewish minority.
Most of the Jewish population in Transcarpathia was forced into ghettos. The largest ghettos in the region were in Berehove, Uzhhorod and Khust. Hodiger, who was fifteen years old at the time, was driven out of him home, together with the other children and women of Vinohradiv, and forced into the ghetto. There were few Jewish men in town because in the years before the German occupation, the Hungarian government had already taken most men into forced labor (munka tabor)
Between May 15 and June 7, 1944--"around Shavuot," as Hodiger puts it, once again using the Jewish calendar as a marker-- the Germans deported about 290,000 Jews from Transcarpathia, mostly to Auschwitz.
In Auschwitz, Hodiger was selected for death twice, but explains that somehow someone convinced the authorities to pick him for forced labor instead. He was among the ten percent of Hungarian Jewish deportees, who were sent to concentration camps in Austria and Germany, where they were put to work for the German war effort.
The deportation of 437,402 Transcarpathian Jews was one of the last stages of the Final Solution, and one of its deadliest.
In the following clip, Hodiger speaks about the period after Auschwitz, when he was moved from one concentration camp to the next. He was liberated by American troops near Dachau.