In May 1944, 15-year-old Zoltán and his parents were deported from their home in Mezősas to the ghetto in Nagyvárad (Oradea). On 26 June, the Hungarian authorities deported them to Auschwitz-Birkenau. On arrival, Zoltán was not sent to the gas chambers by the SS doctors because he lied about his age by declaring himself a year older. According to an article in the newspaper Világ in 1947, Zoltán was living in the half-empty Birkenau Gypsy camp (Sector BIIe) in early October when the notorious SS doctor Dr Josef Mengele declared him and 120 children unfit for work and sent them to one of the crematoria. The children waited naked to die in the gas chamber. However, after further screening, the SS declared 52 children fit for work and sent them back to the camp. The miraculous story comes from several sources. The boys probably survived because they did not have enough working hands to unload an incoming consignment of potatoes. So, for better or worse, Hungarian teenagers who looked stronger were sent to work on the loader. According to one source, Zoltán died of eating too much fatty food after liberation. However, surviving documents prove that he was also transported from Auschwitz by the SS to escape the approaching Red Army. He arrived at the Mauthausen concentration camp on 30 January 1945. His fate is unknown, but he did not survive the Holocaust.