Around eleven o'clock, my brother Zvi and I retired to the room we shared. We finally dropped off to sleep around midnight, on what was to be our last night ever together in our own home. For that matter, it would be the last time for the next four years that I even had a real bed I could call my own on which to sleep.

Around one-thirty in the morning, wild, ferocious screams in Hungarian and banging on our windows broke our sleep. "Open up! Open up!" Frightened, we opened the door, and three Hungarian soldiers pushed through the doorway, bayonets fixed to their rifles. They reeked of whisky. Later, we found out that they'd been given lots of whisky, to be more savage in carrying out their orders. Banging their rifle butts on the floor and on the tables, they screamed, "Faster, faster, get dressed, pack your clothing, you dirty Jews, you are not allowed to stay here anymore!"

From room to room they moved, rifling through drawers on my night table and dresser. My wristwatch lay on the night table. When one of the soldiers spotted it and put it in his pocket, I protested. Without hesitating, he hit me in the chest with his rifle, and accompanied it with a Hungarian curse: "You dirty Jew!" I stopped protesting.

In a low voice, my mother told me to get dressed in my newer clothing. I didn't understand the reason then, but later I did. This was no time for saving something nice for later. It took us less than an hour, though it seemed like an eternity with the Hungarians hovering around us. Then the soldiers herded us out, my father, my mother, me and my brother Zvi, into the synagogue, where only a few hours earlier we had been praying. Inside were other Jews who'd been routed from their homes. Hungarian soldiers were all over the place, inside and surrounding the building. In front, by the synagogue's Western wall near the Holy Ark housing our Torah scrolls, was a local official with a list of all the Jews of Torun. Next to him in civilian clothes were two Hungarians whom we had never seen before. We surmised they must be members of the Hungarian secret police. Soul by soul, they checked the "merchandise" off their list - people already delivered by the troops, and those of Torun's 700-800 Jews who were still to come.

Every few minutes, soldiers would deliver more families. No one knew what would happen to us, and we were terrified. We found out later that this evil deportation decree had been issued on Friday, the week before. In secret, local Ukrainians were told what the Hungarian forces were preparing to do. But our neighbors had kept silent: they did not warn us. We believed we lived in harmony with Torun's gentile population, where we resided together in the Carpathians for hundreds of years. Just the opposite: they seemed very happy that they would soon acquire all the Jewish possessions. (We also learned later that in Bereziv, a village where my favorite aunt lived, the mayor had resisted the Hungarians. "My Jewish neighbors lived here for hundreds of years," he protested, "and I will not stand for that." But he was successful only in delaying the decree for a while, not in eliminating it.)

Everybody was in a state of complete shock and panic. "Where are they taking us?" one asked the other, and nobody knew the answer. When they came to our row, officials told my father that he and my mother weren't on the list because they were over 75 years old. A soldier was ordered to escort them back home. (Apparently, my father's birth certificate listed him as 10 years older than he really was. The reason for this had something to do with World War I, and that was his good fortune now.)

"Thank G-d, Mom and Dad are out," Zvi said to me. He tried to relieve my anxiety by reminding me, "We're young, and we shall overcome all this." The local official who released my parents had a friendly (and profitable) relationship with my father. He was the person who, for a bribe, had removed my brother Zvi's name from the list ordering boys into the labor camp; this was also the same person who had taken a bribe to alter my birth certificate and register me as younger. Although my mother was in her 60s, he had the authority to dismiss her with my father. In total, 17 Jews - all of whom were supposedly older than 75 - were allowed to remain in Torun.

A while later we saw soldiers bringing in my brother Moshe and his wife with their two children. By now, the synagogue was overflowing with men and women, old ones, young ones and babies. Had I all my senses about me, I am certain I could have escaped from there - it was pure pandemonium. I'll never forget the terrible scene before my eyes: the plaintive cries from babies, screams of women, all those people crushed together.

As dawn approached, we saw buses stop nearby. Hungarian soldiers rushed Jews out and loaded them onto these buses. "Where are they taking us?" we asked. Despite the women and small children among us, the soldiers, the drivers, everyone, all said we were being taken to a labor camp. They jammed us onto the buses, overloaded, shoulder to shoulder, and drove off in the direction of biggest nearby city, Chust.

The buses passed through villages like Bistra, Maidan, Soimi, Volova and others, all home to Jewish communities similar to my village of Torun, with 700-1000 souls apiece. Through the windows, we could see Jews going to synagogue in the morning for Tisha b'Av services. They stared at the buses with frightened faces and scared eyes, buses jammed with babies and women, men old and young. Because Torun was a border village, we were the first to be wrested from our homes. These villages would be next: a deportation decree was in effect for them as well - and that, too, was a secret well-kept by the local population.

When we arrived in Chust, the buses drove to a huge lumberyard. The yard was enclosed by a high wooden fence and surrounded by soldiers. It was a warm, sunny day, and they unloaded us into the open area. Families struggled to remain together. Men, women, children, the elderly, the sick, and the helpless, all were deposited there, sitting on the ground with their small bundles of belongings. Children cried. A constant wailing filled the air.

There was no place in the yard for dealing with human necessities, neither for ladies nor men. After sitting there a few hours, people tried to relieve themselves in corners of the yard. Women would go in groups and hold up a coat or cloth to shield themselves. Children relieved themselves all over the place. Every hour or so, new buses arrived, delivering Jewish cargo from different villages.

I walked around the fence inside the yard, and found a loose board. I was convinced I could get out through the hole. Although I had no idea where I would go, I rushed back and told Zvi about it, urging him to join me. "Let's get out, let's get out of here, and we'll worry where to go later."

Zvi disagreed. "How could we leave Moshe alone with the two children? No, we have to stick together. Whatever happens, happens." As it turned out, we could help Moshe very little, but perhaps just having us there made him feel a little more secure.

Scorched from the sun and the heat, we nevertheless fasted the whole day, and suffered greatly from thirst. Toward evening, several young Jewish boys from this town of Chust managed to get close to the yard, and from outside the high fence they whispered in to us, to try to calm our fears. They told us we would be taken to Poland where there were lots of empty houses that people left after the Hungarians marched in there. This was only a rumor - who knew where we were going to be taken - but I guess these boys didn't know what else to tell us to calm our anxieties.

Overnight we remained in that yard. Mothers and fathers tried to make the best of it, laying down jackets or other clothing on which their children could sleep. Infants and babies literally went to sleep on their mothers' breasts. Thank G-d it was a warm night and didn't rain. Late at night, most of the cries subsided, and we could only hear occasional sighs, the moans and groans of the adults. I could barely sleep; nor for that matter could many others. Stunned by my predicament, I gazed absentmindedly up at the clear summer sky. Who knew what to think, what to expect, what to do! Zvi kept trying to calm me, saying, "We will overcome, we will overcome." As far as we knew then, his wife and baby, were still in Kalin. We didn't know their fate, yet we hoped they'd be spared deportation and may be safe by being further from the border.

Like a flock of sheep, we huddled in the yard that night, still not believing we were in imminent danger. I'm certain now that had we known we were being earmarked for destruction, we would have resisted. I am forced to the same conclusion: our eternal Jewish belief in hope contributed to our own demise during the Shoah.

In the morning, soldiers and gendarmes entered the yard, and started chasing us toward the gate with sticks and rifle butts. Again I heard anguished screams from all over the place, cries that reached up to the sky. Families struggled to stay together and share the same destiny. Once outside, we saw that military transport trucks had pulled up for us. The trucks were open, uncovered. Gendarmes and soldiers pushed and beat people with their sticks and rifles, and loaded us onto the trucks until it wasn't possible to force even one more person on board. I have no idea how many of us were jammed onto each truck, but we managed to stay together - Moshe, his wife, the two children, Zvi and I.