The Kallos Family Book 2022

48 • THE KALLOS FAMILY
How I met Barbara Kallos
This is the story of how I met Barbara (Biri)
Kallos and our 2018 trip to Hamburg.
In May 2018 I spent eleven days in Hamburg,
which is surprising because growing up in Melbourne,
the daughter of Holocaust survivor
parents, I was adamant I would never set a foot
inside Germany.
Mao Tse Tung noted that ‘a journey of 1000
miles begins with a single step’. My first step
towards Germany began on 25 July 2016 when,
out of the blue, I received an email from Nechemia
Lerch, a distant cousin-in-law living in
Israel who I hardly knew. Nechemia wrote:
Hi Rosalyn [sic]
Are you familiar with a testimony, given
by your mother [Lily Ruttner] which was
registered by a Jewish agency rep a short time
after your mother & other 3 cousins were freed
from the German camps in May 1945? The doc
is kept in Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. I have a
copy of the original in German & a Hebrew
translation.
Should you like to get it just let me know.
Nechemia explained in further emails how he
had found a reference to this testimony in his
mother-in-law’s apartment after she passed
away in 2009. Nechemia’s mother-in-law was
my cousin Etu Slyomovics. Of course, I asked for
the testimony straight away. I had no idea my
mother had made it and I couldn’t wait to read it.
The testimony is dated 24 July 1945. Reading it
is like hearing a voice from the grave. My mother
died in 2006. Her testimony is more than seventy
years old and was recorded just two and a half
months after her liberation. I discovered later
that it was organised by the National Committee
for Attending Deportees (DEGOB), a Hungarian
Jewish relief organisation. Between 1945 and
1946 DEGOB staff recorded the personal stories
of around 5000 Hungarian Holocaust survivors,
among them my mother and her family, who
came from Ťačovo.
I had the testimony professionally translated
from German into English by two separate translators
to ensure that every word and nuance was
correctly captured. I read and reread it and learnt
that it is very accurate, a goldmine of information,
having been given so soon after liberation.
My further research confirms everything my
mother recounts.
Research at Yad Vashem, Jerusalem
My next step was to contact Yad Vashem. During
the following year and a half, research assistant
Timorah Perel guided me in my quest, providing
many leads and replying in perfect English to my
many questions. My first goal was to identify the
name and location of the ammunition factory.
Although my mother’s testimony noted ‘Lieberstedt
near Bremen’, I did not realise that it
was in fact the name of the ammunition factory
because it was incorrectly spelt in the testimony.
Timorah suggested I contact the Neuengamme
Concentration Camp Memorial in Germany for
assistance to locate the factory.
And so I continued my research.
I wrote to the Neuengamme Memorial website
in September 2016 and received a prompt reply
in English from the Memorial’s archivist, Alyn
Bessman. The letter said, in part:
From the information provided by your
mother to DEGOB in 1945, I could conclude that
your mother and her relatives must have been
transported from Auschwitz to Lübberstedt-Bilohe,
one of the numerous satellite camps of
the Neuengamme concentration camp. The
prisoners there had to work for the Lufthaupt-