Sándor Török 1925 - 1944
Born 5.7.1925 in Cluj / Cluj-Napoca
Died 5.12.1944 in Hartheim
Biography
If I am to write about the true face of humanity in circumstances as extreme as those in the concentration camp, then I also want to tell of the Török family before indifference and forgetting settle over their memory forever like a thick layer of dust.
The Török family, consisting of a father and two sons[1] – I did not know anything about the female members of the family – aged about sixteen and eighteen, were Christians whom a Jewish grandmother who had stumbled into their family had caused to end up in banishment in Melk concentration camp. They came from the small town on the river Marosch (Mureş) near to Neumarkt (Târgu Mureş).
After liberation I thought of them whenever I saw a piece of bread, even a gnawed one. – ‘My bread’s been stolen, father!’ I heard one morning from the bunk where the family slept. Commotion, a search. And look, the bread was found again. An old man already marked by hunger with eyes that sat deep in his face, he might have been around forty but already looked like a seventy-year-old, with a bare head, with a few thin strands of hair, stood there and offered the stolen bread to the young Török, his hand trembling.
Most of the bread was still there since the old man had difficulty chewing it in his toothless mouth. I don’t know how to describe it – this group of people worthy of Rodin’s chisel who stood before me for a few seconds, as a mitigating circumstance for humanity. No one in the Török family reached for the proffered piece of bread. Without a word they turned and left the bread – and life – in the thief’s hands for that day.
I want to make it clear through this episode how this small family died, the father last of all, who survived his sons. How did he experience his final days, alone, before he too died? They were made for a more decent world and with their humanitarian world view soon had to perish in this ruthless wasteland.
Ladislaus Szücs
From: Ladislaus Szücs: Zählappell. Als Arzt im Konzentrationslager [Roll call. A doctor in the concentration camp] (Frankfurt/Main 1995), pp. 42–44.
[1] Editor’s note: Hermann Török’s second son, about whom Ladislaus Szücs writes here, could not be identified by name.
Location In room
