Suddenly the Shadow Fell

Book excerpt: When Leslie Meisels insisted that his mother and two brothers join a transport going who knows where, all he knew was that they had to get out of the terrible holding facility in Debrecen, Hungary. The guards had called for families with four children; they were only three. That decision took them not to a death camp but to forced labour in the Austrian countryside, included in the roughly 20,000 "exchange Jews" whose lives had been bartered for gold, diamonds, and cash in a secret deal between Rudolf Kastner and Adolf Eichmann. As Kastner Jews they were then sent to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where they were kept "on ice" -- allowed to stay together and treated somewhat better than the other prisioners. The transport to Switzerland never materialized; the SS abanded their train to Theresienstadt in April 1945 and they were liberated by the US army. In 2009, through the efforts of a New York history teacher, Meisels was reunited with his American liberators. Added to his memoir is a short account by his wife, Eva, who survived the Nazi occupation of Budapest as a five-year-old with the assistance of Raoul Wallenberg.