She died on this day in March, two weeks before her 22nd birthday. No photo of her survived, and only little is known about her. Anna Goldstein and her several siblings had grown up in the family of a spice trader in the sheltered Jewish community of the Eastern Hungarian town of Hajdúdorog.

In mid-June 1944, the family was forced to move to the ghetto on the periphery of Debrecen, where the SS assembled some 13,000 persons. By the end of the month, four deportation trains went from there to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp. The majority of the deportees were murdered in the gas chambers. The SS crowded the others – including Anna and her older sister Ibolya – into the “depot camp” as a forced labour reserve.

Selections took place weekly. Ibolya was transferred to the subcamp of the Polte company in Duderstadt, Anna to a branch of the HASAG in Altenburg. Tens of thousands of Buchenwald inmates had to work for the armaments company in ammunitions production. Anna died of exhaustion and typhus.

(Harry Stein)

Reference: Christian Gerlach and Götz Aly, Das letzte Kapitel: Der Mord an den ungarischen Juden 1944–1945, Frankfurt am Main 2004.