Written by Peter Baldwin on November 29, 2018 in Remembrance of Ágnes Raducziner and Those Others Who Suffered in Like Ways

With three girls in our house, we occasionally find ourselves hunting for their missing shoes especially when they were younger.  I’m not sure what’s so difficult about leaving your shoes in the same place every time—preferably in your room closet, but for some reason our little girls have had a habit of leaving their shoes all over the house in unexpected places.  Our ritual goes as follows.  Daddy: “Girls, it’s time to leave!” Inevitably, one of them answers: “I can’t find my shoes!”  At which point a frantic search ensues.  My wife Nancy would prefer in many cases that I leave our girls alone to solve their pesky, self-inflicted problems.  She wants them to learn to be more responsible.  But there’s an irresistible urge inside of me that longs to find their lost shoes.  Perhaps, I feel this way due to an unforgettable experience long ago when I met a 68-year-old woman who told a harrowing tale of her teenage years when she almost lost her shoes.  Unlike many around her, she was allowed to keep them.

In the late spring of 1993 near the end of my missionary service in Hungary, I was transferred to Nyíregyháza a touristy, industrial, moderately-sized city in northeastern Hungary nestled between Slovakia, Ukraine, and Romania.  For a brief time, I shared Zone Leader responsibilities with a highly capable companion Elder Justin Rucker who was as enthusiastic and fun to be around as his hair was red.  Indeed, it was!  By that time, I had almost worn out my contact lenses and was often seen wearing rounded metal-frame glasses that wrapped around my ears. I kind of looked like the German guy in the first Indiana Jones movie who had spectacles wrapped around his ears, but I didn’t have the hat.  With our white shirts, ties, and tags, we must have been quite a sight while visiting the Belváros (downtown shopping district).

One day, we were street contacting in the Belváros when we noticed a sweet, elderly lady seated at an outdoor café.  We greeted her, and she immediately struck up a conversation, soon offering to buy us ice cream.  We accepted her act of kindness; and before we knew it, we were enjoying a tasty ice cream and having a nice conversation with her whom we came to know as Ágnes Raducziner.  Elder Rucker describes her in his journal as having an ‘up personality.’  She exuded a positive energy that concealed a tragic past.

We learned Ágnes had lived no ordinary life.  She was a concentration camp survivor who had experienced far worse in a few years than most people will ever experience their entire lives.  She suffered from edema—her legs and arms were greatly swollen.  We soon learned that she had been forced to march by her Nazi captors in the dead of winter with scant food and clothing.  She almost died twice but was miraculously preserved each time.  Her forehead bore a scar caused by a brutal clubbing from an SS Officer. Her mind, though clear, was fixated on the traumatic experiences of her early years.  Back then, I had never heard of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), but that is probably what she had (It wasn’t until 1980 that PTSD was officially recognized by the American Psychiatric Association as a mental disability).  Elder Rucker and I came to believe it was important to Ágnes that we as representatives of Jesus Christ understand what had happened to her so that we always remember her.  She told the story to us repeatedly on separate occasions almost verbatim.  She could recall the vivid details of her ordeal, her separation from family members, the untimely deaths of many of them, and her ordeals of almost freezing and starving to death.   Before departing from the mission field, I asked her to write down her story so that her trials would be preserved.  Most of what she recorded is her ‘after-Auschwitz’ experience, but she does verify that she was captive in Auschwitz at the age of 19 years for 5 months in 1944 from May 23^rd to Oct 23^rd.  We will return to her story shortly.

In Southern Poland an hour’s drive just south of and between the cities of Kraków and Katowice, there exists an infamous memorial site known as Auschwitz with an adjoining sister site named Auschwitz II or Birkenau where in both locations some of the worst atrocities of humanity were committed.  It was there that at least 1.1 million people were murdered by their German captors who had allowed themselves to be infected with the vile Nazi doctrine of creating a master race that was unfailingly loyal to its leadership and merciless to outsiders and outcasts.  90 percent of those who were murdered at Auschwitz were Jews with the remaining deceased comprising Jewish sympathizers, Gypsies, and those with disabilities.  During the time period from 1941 to 1944, the trains regularly arrived with a new group of prisoners first undergoing Selection, a process in which a German doctor would declare each captive either fit to work at nearby factory in usually deplorable conditions (the Germans even had a sign for it called ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’, which in English means: ‘Work Sets You Free’) OR to stay at Auschwitz and be put to death, which was a shock to many as the mass murders were kept a secret.  Those sent to work were not allowed sick days or time off.  Any unable to work were reassigned to Auschwitz and swiftly executed in many cases.  The Germans craftily exploited the optimism and well-wishes of humanity.  A glimmer of hope was always given, leaving the captives with a sense that all was not lost; that they would eventually get out of this mess and return to their normal lives—at least the ‘new normal,’ whatever that meant.

Having been assigned to Auschwitz, the captives were sentenced to live in dismal, over-crowded barracks behind barbed wire.  Food was scarce and practicing good personal hygiene was impossible.  Every couple of days, a group of 700 prisoners would be sent to the ‘showers.’  In preparation, they were instructed to place their clothing on a hook marked with a number to suggest they would be returning to reclaim their belongings.  Having been packed in the showers, the doors were locked, and the shower room unveiled itself as a gas chamber where the prisoners were killed with poisonous Zyklon B gas (a lethal cyanide-based pesticide invented in Germany in the 1920s).  Next, the SS clean-up crew transported the dead bodies to a furnace where they were reduced to ashes.  It took two days to complete the burn.  During that time, the articles of clothing of those who had been murdered were sorted and placed in stacks of like items.  This death rate capacity supported the execution of almost 130,000 prisoners per year if the crematoria were operated around the clock.  Not satisfied with this inefficiency, the Germans built more efficient killing operations in next door Birkenau to expedite the killing process, which process continued until 1944.

Although the Nazi’s deported Jews and others from all their occupied countries to Auschwitz, the lion’s share of captives came from Hungary and Poland.  Of the 440,000 Hungarians deported there, 320,000 of them were sent directly to the gas chambers with the rest being deployed to forced labor camps and eventually to other concentration camps throughout the region.  From Nyíregyháza alone, about 14,000 adults and 2,600 children were deported to concentration camps.  Few came back.  Those who did were changed forever—some bitterly so.  Ágnes Raducziner lost 56 of her family members to the executioners.  One of the most disheartening stacks at Auschwitz (still able to be seen today) is a mountain of children’s shoes from the thousands of children who innocently removed their shoes thinking they were bathing but instead were being executed. 

As Elder Rucker and I listened to Ágnes recount her tragic past, our thoughts and feelings were transported to those dark hours, in which she underwent the deportation process most likely from nearby Debrecen—a regional city in Hungary, which the Germans used as one of several deportation centers across the country.  I pictured her traveling by train to Auschwitz and submitting herself with many others to the Selection process.  She was selected to go to forced labor.  Young Ágnes was allowed to keep her shoes.  She would need good shoes for the hardships she would later endure though she would wear them out before the War was over. Whether she had family members with her during the selection process, we do not know with certainty, but it is likely that several family members deported with her were straightway selected to go to the gas chambers.  Probably most of her 56 family members were put to death at Auschwitz or at some other concentration camp that operated similarly.  On January 15, 1945, Ágnes was forced by SS Officers to evacuate her concentration camp (by that time she had already moved on from Auschwitz) and to travel to Germany as the Nazi’s ceded territory to the approaching Allied forces.  Her account of this experience is as follows:

“I was with several hundred others who, with poorly fitting wooden clogs (shoes), were forced to march in the snow a distance of 20 kilometers per day.  Any who sat down or fell were mercilessly murdered by the SS Officers.  At one point, we entered an abandoned German house where there was still töltött káposzta (stuffed cabbage) warming over the fireplace.  I entered the pantry and took a large onion and ate it as if it were an apple.  [Upon reaching a train station far enough away from the front lines, we were locked in a rail car and we proceeded on our relocation.] When we arrived in Wroczlaw [a city in western Poland], a Red Cross lady served hot tea to the soldiers.  From an opening in the train car, we shivered and pleaded for a little tea. “Nothing for the filthy Jews!” came the retort.  In that instant that I will remember forever, an English airstrike disrupted our conversation causing the SS Officers to abandon the train.  The resulting bomb fragments tore the nurse to pieces.  During the airstrike, many of my group were killed.  I remained alive and protected my head with a rice dish, which was all I had to protect myself from the bomb blasts.

Afterward, we continued our train travel in the numbing cold and soon arrived at Weimar [at the concentration camp called Buchenwald].  Already American planes were striking.  At the train station, I counted 117 aircraft nose diving over our heads.  The SS soldiers were again surprised and left us locked in the train cars…to protect myself, I wrapped an oil-stained blanket over my charcoal black coat and again used my rice dish for extra covering.  Many of my traveling companions died, but I was somehow spared. 

By the end of February, our group arrived at Bergen-Belsen [a concentration camp in northern Germany].  It was there I escaped with two traveling companions from a washroom by hiding in a nearby barracks infested with lice where a typhoid fever epidemic raged.  Upon entering the barracks, I warmed myself with my then companions—Magdi and Klári.  One of them was from Nyíregyháza; the other a young girl from Nagyvárad [also a city in Hungary]. Both would die—the first at the hand of a Nazi, the second from English friendly fire, which came from Allied forces who freed us from our concentration camp on April 15, 1945.

Here there was no crematorium for our mountain of corpses.  We used our hands to pull the deceased out of the barracks.  I became stricken with typhoid and a very high fever ravaged me as I lay among many other sick people.  For three days, a corpse lay on top of me, but I was too weak to push it off.  Our bodies were full of boils from which oozed pus.  The lice climbed all over us and caused horrible pain.  A nurse named Irma Grese, whom I knew from Auschwitz, struck me with a rubber truncheon. “Can’t you stand?” she asked. “Either you don’t want to or you don’t know how to anymore.”  Then she proceeded to strike me in the face above my right eye leaving an enduring scar.

We received only small portions of beef /carrot soup and began to suffer from starvation. Having recovered my strength somewhat, I sought opportunities to steal potato skins that the SS Officers had left in a garbage heap.  I remember the SS women quarreling with each other; one cruelly teased me: “I can see the writing on your face that you will die tomorrow, and you are still foraging for potato skins?”  I gathered together my plunder and went crying to a bathroom where I could look in the mirror to see if my face really had writing that I would die.  I found no such writing.

By this time, the English ground troops were approaching and arrested the SS Officers who were easily identified by their white armbands and their relatively good health.  I washed the potato skins and ravenously consumed them to stay alive. [Miraculously I survived while others who chose to eat the food scrapings from littered cans died of food poisoning].  I will never forget the English advance guard who cried when they discovered our gaunt, bony bodies infested with lice standing among them in the proximity of many bodies lying in excrement.  “Why didn’t we come sooner?” was their anguished cry.  I had no answer and could only watch them in shock.”

After recovering in a Swiss hospital, Young Ágnes returned to Nyíregyháza where she lived a long, productive life blessing the lives of others including two missionaries (Elder Rucker and me!) who were street contacting on a warm spring day.

Auschwitz is more than a dark place.  It represents many dark places.  It has come to symbolize a place of scattering where families were torn apart never to be together again—at least in this life.  I find it remarkable that Auschwitz has been preserved when so many other killing sites from different eras have been dismantled, destroyed, buried, and otherwise hidden from the eyes of the world.  But it is the written records kept and the memorials preserved that keep dark times like these from being forgotten.  I cannot imagine what it would have been like to be Selected and Scattered and I have shed many tears just thinking of all the great people including my friend Ágnes and her family members who suffered and died under such abysmal circumstances by the hands of such evil people.  Auschwitz reminds us how far evil doers will go to achieve their rotten aims.  And in that darkness, we also remember the goodness and nobility of near hopeless people helping each other the best they can.

My mission gave me the sobering privilege of discovering the harrowing ordeals of Ágnes, but I have yet to journey to Auschwitz—that symbolic source of her scattering and suffering.  Some months ago, my 19-year old daughter Elizabeth (the same age as Ágnes when she entered Auschwitz!) was called to serve in the Poland Warsaw Mission and after training in the Polish language for a few months, she arrived less than two weeks ago in now blossoming Poland where she was straightaway assigned to serve in the coal-mining city of Katowice – a short drive from Auschwitz.  Elizabeth now has a chance to understand what happened to Ágnes and others in a way that I never have up to this point in my life.  I hope she will tour the killing grounds.  As an ambassador for Jesus Christ and a Gatherer for Israel, her presence at Auschwitz—along with that of her missionary companions—will be a direct repudiation to all Scatterers in all times and in all places.  I hope during her time there, Elizabeth offers a prayer of mourning for the countless good people who perished there and a prayer of hope and rejoicing in anticipation of their Gathering after this life.  I hope she shares her thoughts and impressions with me of her time there.

Sadly, even today, there are still plenty of Scatterers who find ways to distract, tempt, and destroy families—one family member at a time.  The world needs Gatherers.  We have the privilege and responsibility to be those Gatherers.  Our mission is to build families, to make them stronger, to bind them together, and to help them endure the storms of life.  We hope and pray that our children will continue this noble legacy we have inherited from our ancestors and, like us, fulfill it to the best of their ability.  By doing so, we are literally fulfilling Isaiah’s prophecy (found in Isaiah 52:7): “How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of those who bring good tidings, who publish peace…who publish salvation; who say unto Zion, Thy God reigneth!” [scripture slightly modified to reflect commonly accepted English grammar].  And hopefully our children will remember to wear good shoes.

Picture 1 (top) is Elder Peter Baldwin with Ágnes

Picture 2 (below) is with Elder Justin Rucker and Ágnes