In May 1944, six-year-old János and his family members were taken to the ghetto in and around the MÁV tenement building near the Pécs railway station, and from there to the collection camp set up in the Lakits barracks. Here, more than five thousand Jews from Pécs and the surrounding area awaited their fate, crammed into sheds, starving and lacking even the minimum sanitary conditions. The train deporting the Jews of Pécs left on 4 July 1944 and arrived at the Auschwitz-Birkenau ramp on 8 July. On that day, János was murdered in a gas chamber.