Livia Ungar Greeson
Interviewee: Livia Ungar Greeson
Interviewer: Victoria Vickers
Date of Interview: 16 March 2002
Length of Interview: ~30 minutes
Livia Ungar Greeson was born in Hungary on January 25, 1930. Her family was Jewish and lived in a three room house that had no plumbing and no electricity. When World War II started, Ms. Greeson’s family experienced first-hand some of the most horrifying aspects of the war. Her father, a shoemaker, was forced to work for the Nazi Army, while she and her mother were taken by cattle car from their home in Hungary to the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1944. Ms. Greeson was fourteen years old; that was the last time she saw her father. She recalls that the Nazis told the people that they were being “relocated.” From Auschwitz, she and her mother were sent to Krakow and then to Bergen-Belsen, where her mother died—four days before the camp was liberated. Ms. Greeson vividly describes the horrors of the camps in this heart-wrenching interview. She discusses the food that was given to the prisoners, the beatings that she suffered, and the piles of dead bodies outside of the barracks because more were dying than the crematoriums could keep up with. She also discusses the treatment they received from the Nazi soldiers and the especially cruel treatment they received from the women Nazis who were placed in charge of them. By the time that she was liberated, Ms. Greeson was so malnourished she could no longer walk. She describes having to crawl around during her final weeks in the camp until on 15 April 1945 when Bergen-Belsen was liberated. A few years later, in 1947, Ms. Greeson came to the U.S. to stay with family. Her account of World War II, from the perspective of a teenager in a concentration camp, is riveting, gruesome, and sad. It is also very well told and gracious of her to have shared with historians.