Alan Brown Testimony

Abstract

Video testimony of Alan Brown (Holocaust survivor). Summary I was born in Miskolc, Hungary on March 20, 1928 to Erma Kallos Braun and Sandor Braun. When the Nazis entered my native Hungary, I was incarcerated in the Miskolc Ghetto. On June 6, 1944, D-Day with the German defeat rapidly approaching, the ghetto was liquidated. My mother, grandmothers, grandfather, and an aunt were transported to Auschwitz where they were killed. My father and I were taken by the Hungarian military for forced labor. For 6 months we worked in a coal mine and on road construction, gathered the harvest and cleared snow. In December, the Hungarians turned us over to the Germans for deportation to the Neuhaus labor camp in Austria. Although there for less than 4 months, only a few of us survived. My father and I escaped death in a killing field because the SS had no time to murder us. Amidst the horror of this time, I was helped by a special woman, a Righteous Gentile, Rosa Schreiber, who gave me medicine for my sick father and risked her life by leaving bread for me each day. My father died the night after we were liberated. I am the only survivor. I came to the US in 1949. Since retiring as a professor of economics, I have devoted myself to education on the Holocaust. My wife Barbara and I have 3 children and 6 grandchildren.