Hitler was not appeased by the gains he made as a result of the Munich Agreement and, less than six months after the annexation of the Sudetenland region, he moved to crush whatever was left of Czechoslovakia. On March 15, 1939, the Wehrmacht occupied the Czech lands, establishing the “Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.” Though not formally annexed by Germany, Bohemia and Moravia became for all practical purposes a country under German rule. At about the same time Hitler gave Hungary permission to occupy the part of the region of Subcarpathian Rus that until then had formally remained part of Czechoslovakia.
For Slovakia, Hitler had different designs. With the cooperation of the right-wing Slovak Nationalist Party under the leadership of the Catholic priest Jozef Tiso, an independent Slovak State was established on March 14, with Tiso becoming its president. Deputies who were initially reluctant to ratify the new Slovak State were “persuaded” when Germany issued a threat that Slovakia would be partitioned between Hungary and Poland. Tiso then sent Hitler a telegram, drafted for him by the Germans, asking that Germany kindly take over the protection of the newly established state.
The new Slovak government wasted no time in starting to curtail the rights of the Jewish population. In April 1939, barely a month after the establishment of the Fascist Slovak State, the new parliament adopted a law limiting the participation of Jews in certain professions to 4 percent. This action was followed by a series of laws prohibiting Jews from owning businesses and introducing the concept of “Aryanization,” leading to the replacement of Jewish owners by new Aryan owners.
In September 1941, the Slovak government passed the so-called Jewish Codex, a comprehensive set of regulations stripping Jews—defined on the basis of “race” and ancestry, not religious observance—of all basic rights and liberties. In addition to prohibiting Jews from running for public office, voting, carrying out any professional activities, holding jobs in government or public organizations, and attending school beyond the elementary school level, the sixty-page document went as far as specifically prohibiting Jews from fishing, driving, owning cameras, and carrying or having at home more than the equivalent of forty dollars in cash. So that they would be readily identifiable, Jews were ordered to affix on their outer garment at all times a clearly visible yellow Star of David.
In 1938, a few months before the dissolution of Czechoslovakia, our family had moved to an apartment in a newly constructed building in the center of Bratislava. Like our previous apartment, it too was a rental. My parents never owned a house or an apartment in their lives. In the late 1930s they had bought a plot in a prime spot on a hill overlooking Bratislava and the Danube River, and were planning to build a home on it, but their plans were thwarted by the establishment of the Slovak State. The land was Aryanized, only to be returned to us after the end of the war, but then the advent of Communism once again interfered with the construction of a family residence.
The new apartment in the center of Bratislava was not roomier than the old one, but it came with amenities such as built-in closets, which were still quite rare in those days. We did not get to enjoy living in the new apartment for very long. One of the provisions of the discriminatory laws was that Jews were not allowed to live in certain sections of towns. We were ordered to move to a much smaller, inferior apartment in a working-class neighborhood of Bratislava called Tehelné pole (“Brick Field”).
We were among many Jewish families ordered to move to that section of town, to the dismay of a portion of the original non-Jewish population. A large wooden fence in our neighborhood was decorated with a freshly painted message, “JEWS, THE ROAD TO PALESTINE DOES NOT LEAD THROUGH TEHELNÉ POLE!” Until our move to Tehelné pole I had not experienced overt anti-Semitism. Soon after our move, as I bicycled around the block that included our new home, a group of neighborhood children and adults formed a human wall to stop me. Forced to dismount my bicycle, they screamed at me to get out of their neighborhood and go bicycle to Palestine instead.
Passing the Jewish Codex enabled the government to make life utterly miserable for Jews, but our lives were not yet threatened. This was to change very soon. In December 1941, the Slovak premier Vojtech Tuka, a member of the radical pro-Nazi wing of the government, negotiated an agreement with the German ambassador to Slovakia, Hanns E. Ludin, which authorized the forced deportation of Jews from Slovakia to territories controlled by Germany. So eager were the Slovak Nazis to get rid of the Jews, they even agreed to pay a “resettling fee” of five hundred German marks for every Jew accepted by the German authorities. By October 1942, some fifty-eight thousand Jews—two-thirds of all Jews living in Slovakia—were forcibly deported to German concentration camps, mainly Auschwitz; very few of the deportees survived to the end of the war.
Up to this point the persecution of Jews in Slovakia followed a script very similar to that being applied in Germany, Austria, the Czech lands, and Poland. Eradication of Jews in the Baltic countries and parts of the Soviet Union occupied by German troops in 1941–42 was even more violent and brutal. In contrast to these countries and regions under direct German control, deportations of Jews from Slovakia were suddenly halted in October 1942.
According to some sources, the cessation of deportations happened as a result of efforts of surviving Jewish leaders, who made sure that members of the Slovak government clearly understood that deported Jews were not being “resettled” but slated for extermination. It was also the result of help from more moderate members of the Slovak pro-Nazi government and perhaps a slight push from Vatican officials interested mainly in protecting Jews who had converted to Catholicism. The Jews who were left in Slovakia after the cessation of deportations were still subject to the harsh treatment mandated by the discriminatory laws, but for nearly two years there were no mass deportations to concentration camps in Germany or German-occupied territories.
Another Slovak anomaly was that some Jews were able to obtain legal exemptions from persecutions imposed by the Jewish Codex. One type of exemption that could be granted only by Jozef Tiso constituted a partial or complete pardon from provisions of the Jewish Codex. People awarded a complete pardon were for most practical purposes once again treated as ordinary citizens. Other types of partial exemptions could be granted by several branches of the Slovak government. Jews who were able to obtain such exemptions (called výnimky) were allowed to practice their professions, albeit with restrictions, and they were not required to display yellow Stars of David on their garments.
The výnimky granting process was opaque, and as far as I know, exact records of how they were granted and how many were issued have not been preserved. What is known is that hefty administrative fees had to be paid for the exemptions, and an estimated total of five to ten thousand individuals benefitted from them. Persons granted these exemptions tended to be affluent, educated, and, almost without exception, converts to Christianity.
The official justification for granting these exemptions was that, at least in the short run, Slovakia could not function without educated Jews, because there weren’t enough Aryan physicians, dentists, pharmacists, people with engineering degrees, or economists. Connections and bribes likely played a significant role, too, in the decision of who did and who did not receive what in reality amounted to a reprieve from a death sentence. The laws made clear that výnimky could be withdrawn at any time.
In 1942 my parents applied for and were granted exemptions from the provisions of the Jewish Codex. On behalf of herself and me, my mother was granted a full exemption from all provisions of the Codex, probably because she was a physician, and she had converted to Catholicism at an early date. My father was considered essential for the Slovak wartime economy in view of his intimate understanding of the national coal business, but he received only a partial exemption, perhaps because he converted to Catholicism later than my mother. His partial exemption meant that he did not have to wear the yellow star and he was allowed to work, but he was still prohibited from owning a camera, going fishing, and driving a car, along with numerous other restrictions. My father was an avid photographer, but fortunately he was not fond of fishing and he had never learned how to drive.
I completed the first two grades of elementary school in a public boys’ school located near our family home on Grösslingova Street. In a group photo from the first grade I can still identify two Jewish boys among my thirty-nine classmates. By the time I was ready to advance to the third grade in the fall of 1941, my parents knew that I would no longer be allowed to continue attending a regular public school. They could have enrolled me in a specially designated school for Jewish children, but my parents decided not to do that.
To protect me from the possibility that I would be sent with them to a concentration camp, my parents chose an unconventional path: they placed me in an orphanage with an affiliated school run by Catholic nuns. The nuns belonged to the Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul. Recognizable by their huge triangular starched white hats, the St. Vincent’s Sisters were known for devoting their lives to the education of needy children.
The orphanage and school occupied an imposing Victorian building on Hlboká Street, to this day a prominent and well-known structure in Bratislava. Even though I was by then officially a christened Catholic, accepting me was almost certainly illegal at the time and it was brave of the St. Vincent’s Sisters to do it. I entered the school with another Jewish boy of the same age, my close friend and classmate from the first and second grades, Jan Deutsch.
When I mention that at age eight I was separated from my parents and placed in an orphanage, people assume that it must have been a traumatic experience. Some memories I retain are certainly Dickensian. I slept in a huge room with about fifty other boys—most of them orphans. The boys who wetted their sheets during the night (I was not among them) were required to stand in the morning with their soiled sheets in hand for all to see. Supervising us during the times we were not in class, especially in the dining room and during sports, was a man whose official title was “prefect” (we addressed him pán prefekt, literally “Mr. Prefect”) who walked around with a thin bamboo stick, ready to hit any boy who misbehaved. But most of my other memories are benign. I recall that the St. Vincent Sisters were devoted teachers and I liked them. There was heavy emphasis on Catholic religious instruction, devoting as much as an hour a day to it. At the age of eight I became a devout Catholic, praying daily as I was required to do, and even serving as an altar boy during Holy Mass at the orphanage chapel.
Classes in religion were taught not by the nuns, but by the priest, who I also remember as kind and caring. There is little I remember from my Catholic religion classes, but one “fact” stayed with me—that the Jews were responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus. I also recall that our priest-teacher asked us to save silver foils from candies and press them into shiny balls that would help missionaries convert African children to Christianity, so they too could go to heaven. I obliged.
While at the orphanage, I was not completely separated from my family. During my stay there, my parents were able to move from Tehelné pole to an apartment in a nicer neighborhood on a hill known as Kalvária. The new residence was a one-bedroom apartment, not even half the size of our prewar apartments, but it was in a two-family house in a pleasant residential section, only a fifteen-minute walk from the orphanage. Our neighbors, the Blagodarnys, émigrés from Communist Russia, were kind to my parents and to me. On weekends, when I came home, our neighbors would prepare authentic Russian pierogi—small dumplings filled with ground meat—that they often shared with us.
During the time we lived in the Kalvária Hill district, the Blagodarnys went to the movies at least once a week. They were not movie buffs; in fact, they would usually leave the theater before the main feature was screened. They went to the cinema in those pre-TV days to see the weekly news journal that always preceded the feature movie. That news regularly showed the German army, then still victorious, advancing on Russian soil. The Blagodarnys had no warm feelings for the Germans (or the Soviets for that matter), but they were dying to catch glimpses of their beloved Russian homeland.
During this period, my maternal grandparents were evicted from their apartment too and had to move into my parents’ Kalvária Hill apartment. With Grandpa and Grandma occupying a maid’s room in the one-bedroom apartment, the space was tight. Nevertheless, I enjoyed the time I spent with my family and Kalos, when, after the end of school on Saturdays, I could walk home to Kalvária Hill. I also spent much of the summer vacation after the third grade with my parents.
There were some tense moments between my parents and me precipitated by the Catholic religious education I was receiving. My parents were not required to wear the Jewish star, but my grandparents, who apparently could not receive a legal exemption, had to display the yellow stars whenever they left the house. So as not to confuse me, my grandparents tried to hide their stars from me, but of course, they were not successful. “Are we Jewish or are we Catholic?” I demanded to know, pointing to my grandparents’ overcoats.
At the orphanage school I was brainwashed not only to become a devout Catholic, but also to be a loyal citizen of the pro-Nazi Slovak State. I suspect that most of the St. Vincent Sisters were not Nazi sympathizers, otherwise they would not have protected Jewish boys, but government regulations required that educators instill in their pupils a feeling of loyalty toward the pro-Nazi regime. One day I was taken with my entire class to wish a happy birthday to Vojtech Tuka, the premier of Slovakia and one of the most outspoken supporters of the eradication of the entire Jewish population.
As my ninth birthday was approaching, a Jewish friend of our family asked me what present I would like to get for my birthday. Without hesitation I said that I would like to have a Hlinka Youth organization uniform. The Hlinka Youth, named after the Slovak nationalist Andrej Hlinka, was the Slovak equivalent of Hitler Youth. My parents and their friend turned pale, but were afraid to say anything to me. I did not get the uniform.
Another present I desperately coveted but never received was an electric toy train. My second cousin Hansi had a toy train, complete with ramps and tunnels, and I was dying to have one too. My parents never bought me a toy train. My cousin Hansi was taken to Auschwitz in 1944, where he perished.
Early in 1943 my mother was assigned to run an ophthalmology office in Prievidza, at the time a town with a population of five thousand in west-central Slovakia, some hundred miles away from Bratislava. After her move to Prievidza, my father continued to work in Bratislava, living with my maternal grandmother in the Kalvária Hill apartment. My grandfather had died of natural causes at the beginning of 1943 when I was still at the Catholic orphanage boarding school.
An event that occurred in the spring of 1943, along with my mother’s transfer to Prievidza, led to my parents’ decision to take me out of the orphanage. A reporter came to the orphanage to document the lives of the orphans and the laudable work done by the St. Vincent Sisters. Soon an article was published in a Slovak weekly magazine, including a photo of me. I was not identified by name, but my parents were worried that someone would recognize me and realize that I was being illegally protected. In fact, the need to keep me in the orphanage at that moment in time was no longer pressing because Jewish transports from Slovakia to concentration camps ended in the fall of 1942 and my parents had secured legal exemptions from the discriminatory anti-Jewish laws. My parents made the decision that I would join my mother in Prievidza. My father would continue living in Bratislava, where he was allowed to work.
I finished the fourth year of elementary school while at the orphanage, and with my good grades, I had the option to skip fifth grade and apply for acceptance to a gymnázium. There was a public gymnázium in Prievidza and they were ready to take me. I assume that despite the laws prohibiting Jewish children from attending regular public school and especially any school above elementary school level, I was accepted to the Prievidza gymnázium because of my parents’ and my exemptions. I recall, too, that most people in Prievidza, who must have known of my mother’s and my Jewish ancestry—after all, it was a small town in a small country—were extremely kind to us. It is remarkable that during the year-plus we spent in Prievidza I don’t recall experiencing a single anti-Semitic incident.
In Prievidza my mother and I lived in a small apartment in a one-story house. The larger room was reserved for my mother’s ophthalmology practice, but my mother also slept there on a sofa. The smaller room served as both a living room and my bedroom. My mother befriended two families in Prievidza. One was a Jewish general practitioner, Dr. Ján Neumann, and his non-Jewish wife, Helena, a teacher at the local gymnázium. Helena married Dr. Neumann, a widower, in 1941 or 1942, thus protecting him from being sent to a concentration camp.
The second family my mother befriended were the Heumanns, fully Jewish, and, until the Fascist takeover, the wealthiest people in Prievidza. The Heumanns had owned a successful company called Carpathia that made fruit preserves; like all Jewish-owned enterprises, the company was Aryanized, but the former owners were still actively managing the business. My mother and I were frequent guests of the Neumanns and the Heumanns in their affluent family homes. At least outwardly, these two families appeared to be living fairly normal and comfortable lives. And this was in 1943, only about a year after two-thirds of the Slovak Jewry had been deported to extermination camps. I should add that in 1941 Prievidza had a Jewish community of several hundred people. By the time my mother and I moved to Prievidza, most of them were gone, and probably no longer alive. Our modest but relatively safe life in Prievidza in the midst of the Second World War is but one example of the many paradoxes that existed in Slovakia in those days.
I completed the first grade of the gymnázium at the end of June 1944. Less than two months later our lives were once again torn apart by the surrounding circumstances.
An armed insurrection against the pro-Nazi Slovak government of Jozef Tiso was launched on August 29, 1944. The Slovak National Uprising, as the insurrection came to be known, was organized with the support of Edvard Beneš, the president of Czechoslovakia, and his exiled government in London. The nucleus of the uprising was dissident groups of the Slovak army and members of the Slovak intelligentsia opposed to the Nazis. Their actions converged around the town of Banská Bystrica in central Slovakia. At about the same time the German Wehrmacht and SS units started occupying Slovakia from the west and north. Bratislava remained in the hands of the Tiso government, but central Slovakia, including Prievidza, fell under the control of the insurgents.
My mother and I were overjoyed when suddenly Czechoslovak flags featuring a blue triangle wedged between white and red stripes were hoisted on some buildings in Prievidza. My father caught the last train out of Bratislava to Prievidza, before all transportation between government-controlled and rebel-held territories was halted.
Our joy was short-lived. In a few weeks it became clear that the rebel forces were too weak to resist the onslaught of the German army and the special Slovak units still loyal to the pro-Nazi government. My parents knew that we couldn’t stay in Prievidza because the Germans and their Slovak allies would not recognize the legal exemptions issued by the Tiso government.
We consulted with our friends, the Neumanns. Dr. Neumann had already some years earlier built an underground hiding place for himself and his elderly father somewhere deep in the woods and had arranged with reliable non-Jewish friends that they would bring him food and other essential supplies. Dr. Neumann’s wife, though not Jewish and therefore not in immediate danger of being killed or deported, did not want to stay in Prievidza either, lest she would be interrogated and forced to reveal her husband’s hiding place. Mrs. Neumann knew a family in a remote hamlet near the village of Valaská Belá, some twenty-five miles away from Prievidza. It was decided that my mother and I would seek shelter in Valaská Belá together with Mrs. Neumann.
My father decided not to come with us, fearing that the presence of a forty-eight-year-old man would arouse suspicion, since most men that age were working or serving in the army. Instead he decided to retreat with the rebel military units to the town of Banská Bystrica, the epicenter of the uprising.
The hamlet where we sought shelter consisted of only half a dozen dwellings, occupied by peasant families. The place was truly remote, about a mile-long climb from the highway up a steep hill. It was not accessible by car and only with great difficulty by a horse-drawn carriage. The families living there supported themselves by primitive farming on tiny plots of land and by raising farm animals—cows, pigs, geese, and chickens. Houses in Slovak villages in those days had no plumbing, no telephones, and often no electricity. The house we moved into had dirt floors. My mother and Mrs. Neumann were a bit shocked but determined to make the best out of it. At age eleven, I didn’t mind having no bathroom and not taking baths—it was like being at a summer camp.
It was late September and the weather was still mild. To make myself useful I offered to take the landlady’s cows out to pasture. The offer was accepted. I was instructed where to take the cows and when to bring them back home to their stables. After only a few days I considered myself an expert cow-boy, until something unexpected happened.
It was not unusual in those days to see British or American warplanes flying to or from a bombing mission. As I was watching the cows grazing peacefully, I noticed a squadron of bombers flying, as usual, in the relative safety of high altitude. Then I heard the roar of a nearby explosion as one of the planes dropped several bombs over empty land. I had no idea what was going on, or whether the next bombs would be dropped right on top of me. In a terrified dash for shelter, I lost sight of my cows and when I recovered from the shock, I saw the panicked cows running away madly. I waited, hoping the cows would return to the same pasture, but they did not. I was petrified anew. How would I explain to our landlady that I had lost all her cows? Finally, not knowing what else to do, I dragged myself the one-or two-mile distance back to the hamlet. To my astonishment, all the cows were back in their stables. They had returned home without my help.
My mother, Mrs. Neumann, and I did not stay in the hamlet much longer. There were rumors of armed clashes between the retreating insurgents and forces loyal to the Tiso government in the surrounding area, and my mother felt that our shelter was not safe. We packed up and moved to Nitrianske Rudno, a village about ten miles down the road. We did not know anyone there, but we found a Jewish dentist, who—to our surprise—was still living openly in his own house. My mother asked if he could recommend a reliable person or family who might be willing to take us in and protect us. The dentist recommended Tomáš and Mária Javorček, a couple who had recently returned to the village after living and working for many years in pre–World War II France. He told us that after the German invasion Tomáš had fought the Germans in the French army and he hated the Nazis. Not being Jewish, Mrs. Neumann decided to take a chance and go back home to Prievidza, but my mother and I moved in with the Javorčeks.
Theirs was an old but unusually large house, a former manor, bought with the couple’s savings upon returning from France where, before joining the French army, Tomáš was a factory worker and Mária a maid in the household of a rich Parisian family. The house was not only one of the largest in the village, it was also situated smack at the intersection of two highways—not an ideal hiding place. But my mother was relieved that we had found a sympathetic family and paid little attention to the location. My mother still had some cash and a fee for room and board was agreed upon. The Javorčeks proposed that we use their spacious bedroom; they would be sleeping with their two small children in a den. Their house too lacked indoor plumbing, but it had a handsome wooden floor, and it was quite comfortably furnished.
We stayed with the Javorčeks from mid-October 1944 through our liberation by the Soviet army on April 4, 1945, living more or less in the open. The official explanation of why we came to live in Nitrianske Rudno was that we left our home in Bratislava in order to escape air raids—not an unlikely story since Bratislava was an industrial center frequently bombed by Allied warplanes. My mother had an official Slovak identity card issued in her own name that listed her religion as Roman Catholic. I am not sure if this was a legitimate document to which she had been entitled because she was “exempted” from being considered Jewish, or whether this was a counterfeit identity card bought on the black market. As an eleven-year-old child I didn’t need an identity card.
In order to blend in with the local population and to resemble Slovak peasant women around her, my mother started wearing a kerchief over her head. The Javorčeks certainly knew that we were Jewish. Did other people in the village know? I believe that at the very least they must have suspected it. It attests to the decency of the people of Nitrianske Rudno that no one reported our suspicious presence to the authorities. Members of the occupying German forces came through town regularly enough, and a single word to one of those soldiers could have meant the loss of our lives. Nor did anyone report the Javorčeks for illegally harboring Jews—an offense severely punishable at the time.
At the beginning of our stay in Nitrianske Rudno not much was happening. My mother was helping Mrs. Javorček with household chores. The Javorčeks owned a vegetable garden and a small field where they grew corn. They were also raising chickens, geese, and pigs. Homegrown vegetables, eggs laid by the chickens, and meat from the farm animals provided much of the daily food; fresh milk we had to buy from the neighbors who owned cows. Twice a week Mrs. Javorček would knead dough to make homemade bread, later baked in a special oven by one of the neighbors, the designated baker.
I did not attend classes because the village had only an elementary school, for which I was too old. Commuting fifteen miles to the gymnázium in Prievidza—even if it were technically feasible—was out of the question as I would be immediately recognized there. Since there were no cows for me to take to pasture, I spent my days reading whatever books and periodicals I could lay my hands on, and playing with the neighbors’ boys, quite happy not going to school. I remember being bored. I missed my father and grandmother. Grandma had stayed behind in Bratislava when my father departed in a hurry to join my mother and me in Prievidza just before the German troops had moved into Bratislava. We had no news from either one of them since leaving Prievidza in September.
As the winter approached the relatively tranquil environment of our first weeks in Nitrianske Rudno began to change. Initially, it was the partisans fighting the Germans who would start paying us visits, sometimes in broad daylight, sometimes at night. Because our house was so large and easily accessible from the intersection of two highways, they often knocked on our door—automatic rifles strapped around their shoulders—eager to come in to warm up and have a conversation. The Javorčeks and my mother generally welcomed them, and we would offer them a warm drink and words of encouragement before they returned to their hideouts in the woods. But soon less welcome visitors—German army soldiers—started to show up in the village. They too found their way into the Javorček house. These were ordinary members of the Wehrmacht, army soldiers, not the fanatic members of the SS troops. Yet it is an understatement to say that my mother was uncomfortable seeing German soldiers.
At age eleven, I viewed the German soldiers with an equal measure of dread and fascination. My mother instructed me never to reveal that I could speak German—one of the three languages I knew by the age of four—in front of the soldiers. Then one day a group of three German soldiers came into the house to seek respite from the cold weather and to rest up. They sat down in the kitchen, the only warm room in the house, heated by a wood-burning kitchen stove. Tomáš and Mária, their two small children, my mother, and I were also in the kitchen, mostly silent. One of the German soldiers, I think a noncommissioned officer, finished smoking and was looking for a place to extinguish his cigarette. “Da unten” (“here down below”), I said, pointing to the grates at the bottom of the burning kitchen stove. Then I froze in panic. “Ah, you speak German?” the soldier inquired. “Learn German in school,” my mother tried to explain, pretending to know only a few words of German. I remember the surprised expression on the German’s face. The air was thick with tension. Then the soldiers departed without an incident.
There were numerous other difficult moments. One day we saw armed German soldiers marching a family, two or three adults and a couple of kids, almost certainly Jewish, up the highway in front of our windows. We didn’t know who they were or how they were found out. Later we learned that the whole family was shot dead in the neighboring village.
Another day, two partisans entered the village while several German soldiers were visiting the local pub only two hundred feet from the Javorčeks’ home. Local residents warned the partisans about the presence of the German soldiers, but instead of retreating, the partisans decided to use the situation as an opportunity to inflict casualties on the Germans. We watched from the window of our house as they positioned themselves behind a fence, their Russian-made automatic rifles aimed at the entrance of the pub. As the German soldiers exited the pub, the partisans opened fire. They missed, enabling the Germans to rapidly retreat back into the pub. The two partisans, young and apparently inexperienced in matters of warfare, continued waiting in their hideout. Within minutes, German reinforcements arrived in two armored vehicles, shooting and killing the two partisans—all of this in our plain view. The dead bodies of the partisans were left lying in a ditch for the rest of the day, as people were afraid to come out and move them.
If a similar incident had happened in 1941 or 1942, rather than at the beginning of 1945, the entire population of Nitrianske Rudno would likely have been held responsible and severely punished by the Germans. By this time though, with the Russian army already advancing in eastern Slovakia, the Germans seemed more intent on saving their own skins than punishing the local population.
Around the same time Nitrianske Rudno was also visited by Hungarian troops fighting alongside the Germans. On a sunny, springlike day in February 1945, two Hungarian soldiers were resting in the Javorčeks’ yard while I was visiting the outhouse. As I passed the two soldiers—who would never have suspected that I understood Hungarian—one of them, pointing at me, said to his companion, “Nézz ide, én biztos vagyok hogy ez egy Zsidó gyerek” (“Look here, I am sure this is a Jewish child”). After seventy years I still remember how scared I was when I heard this comment. Would my mother and I now be marched to our death like the Jewish family a few weeks earlier? I quickly returned to the house and closed the door behind me. The Hungarian soldiers departed moments later.
After living in Nitrianske Rudno for about three months my mother ran out of money. Nor did she have any jewelry or other possessions to pawn or sell. When she told the Javorčeks that she could not continue paying for our room and board, they said that was fine, we could stay with them anyway. But my mother felt uneasy accepting the offer because the Javorčeks were unemployed (as were most other people in the village at the time), and they had no source of income. Although they produced much of the food they and we consumed on their small piece of land, they needed some cash to pay for flour and a few other staples.
My mother concocted a bold plan. She had a gentile friend in Bratislava, Mrs. Subak, an ethnic German, who my mother thought would still be sufficiently well-off to be able to help. My mother prepared a handwritten letter to her friend, explaining our situation and asking if Mrs. Subak could lend her money that would be sufficient to tide us over through the end of the war. Of course, my mother could not send the letter by mail because it could have gotten into the wrong hands, so she asked Tomáš Javorček to travel to Bratislava by train (a nearly three-hour journey each way, including a long hike to the train station), find Mrs. Subak, give her the letter in the strict privacy of her home, and if she were to agree, bring the cash back with him to us. As unlikely as it sounds, the plan worked and, as a result of Mrs. Subak’s enormous generosity, Tomáš returned with a substantial enough sum of money that allowed us to pay the Javorčeks and any other expenses through our liberation by the Soviet army. After the war, my mother repaid the loan and thanked Mrs. Subak in person for her courageous act of friendship and humanity.
By February 1945, we could hear the roar of heavy artillery fire as the front line moved closer to us. Our hopes for the fall of the Nazi regime were rising by the day. At the same time my mother had told me that the final weeks could be treacherous. Visits by German soldiers to our house became more frequent. At one time my mother and I had to move out of the large bedroom and sleep in the kitchen when a group of Wehrmacht officers requisitioned the space as their quarters for a few days before their unit had moved on. We did have the feeling that they viewed us with some suspicion, because despite my mother’s kerchief and my worn clothes, neither one of us looked like we belonged there. I had dark curly hair—uncommon among Slavic people—and if the Hungarian soldier recognized that I looked Jewish, so could the Germans. My mother’s features, though perhaps not very Jewish, also left no doubt that she was no peasant, with or without a kerchief covering her hair. In the end they left us alone.
Finally, on April 3, the last German troops departed, heading north toward Valaská Belá. On April 4, the first reconnaissance unit of about eight or ten Russian soldiers, including some women, with automatic rifles at the ready, walked up the highway in front of our house. Tomáš Javorček, unable to suppress his joy and excitement, came out of the house, infant child on his arm, to welcome them. Despite my mother’s effort to prevent me from leaving the house, I followed Tomáš. “Na Berlin” (“On to Berlin”), shouted one of the soldiers. “Na Berlin” was Tomáš Javorček’s response. The six long years of waiting for the end of the Nazi rule were finally over.
Not everything was roses. After the first reconnaissance unit had moved on, more Russian troops arrived. Of course, they would not miss coming to the prominently situated Javorčeks’ house, asking for bread and vodka. We obliged with the food, but not the drink, not wanting a houseful of drunken, rowdy soldiers; I don’t think the Javorčeks had any vodka anyway. The soldiers looked bedraggled, tired, and hungry. They were all very young, and judging from their facial features they must have hailed mostly from the Asian regions of the Soviet Union.
Later that day a Russian officer arrived and immediately became overly friendly to my mother. He announced that he would return at night. That, my mother and the Javorčeks knew, was a dangerous prospect, and as soon as the officer left, my mother decided that she had to spend the night elsewhere. For some reason it was decided that my mother and I would hide in a nearby brick factory. The factory had a large enclosed hall, which to our surprise was filled with people, mostly families, who all looked like refugees. We did not know who these people were or for how long they were staying there, and we did not pry. We lay down on the floor, covered ourselves with the blankets we brought with us, and passed a sleepless night. Mrs. Javorček came in the morning to tell us that the Russian officer had been outraged that my mother was not there when he came back, but eventually left without harming anyone. It was now safe to return to the Javorčeks’ house.
We stayed in Nitrianske Rudno a couple more days, but my mother was restless. She did not know what had happened to her mother, who had been alone in Bratislava since my father had left there in a hurry in August of the preceding year. About my father we knew only that he left with the retreating insurgents in the general direction of Banská Bystrica, but we had no idea where he was or whether he was still alive.
Even though getting on the road was not entirely safe—there was a great deal of army traffic and Russian soldiers could be unpredictable—my mother decided to return to Prievidza where she would try to find friends. There was of course no public transportation in those days, but my mother packed our belongings into two small bags and found a friendly (though not overly friendly) Russian soldier who offered to take us to the small town of Nováky, about halfway between Nitrianske Rudno and Prievidza; from there we would have to find some other mode of transportation to reach Prievidza.
We said an emotional good-bye to the Javorčeks, climbed onto the open Russian army truck, and departed. There was heavy military traffic, and the nine-mile journey to Nováky took almost an hour. We got off at a three-way highway junction. My mother and I were standing by the highway contemplating what to do next, when, only a few minutes later, a civilian passenger car stopped, seemingly for us. The door opened and out stepped my father.
We learned that after the uprising had been suppressed in October 1944, my father walked through woods and small country roads toward the Russian front. Once he was stopped by a German patrol and taken in for questioning, but somehow he managed to extricate himself. He continued walking eastward and by mid-December succeeded in crossing the front line to the Russian army and reached the liberated town of Užhorod in the region of Subcarpathian Rus that until 1939 was part of Czechoslovakia but is now in Ukraine. There my father offered his services to the Czechoslovak government in exile.
By January 1945, the temporary government moved to the liberated eastern Slovakian city of Košice, and my father moved with them. When he learned that Prievidza had been secured by the Russians in early April, he found a car and a driver (not an easy feat in those days) to take him the 170-mile distance over war-torn roads from Košice to Prievidza, determined to try to locate us in the midst of the postliberation turmoil. He, too, had no idea whether we were alive and how we had spent the seven months since our separation. Someone in Prievidza told him that we might be in Nitrianske Rudno. He was heading to Nitrianske Rudno when he spotted us on the highway. The joyous reunion with my father on an open highway, amidst chaotic circumstances, after a long winter of separation, stands out as one of the most vivid memories of my life.
There was no such happy reunion with my grandmother. As we learned only much later, my grandmother was rounded up in Bratislava in October 1944 and taken to a concentration camp. My mother was never able to find out where or how she died. Some survivors reported that she was taken to Ravensbrück, a notorious women’s concentration camp in northern Germany, where, given the history of that camp, she very likely died of typhoid fever in early 1945.