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Currently a few older members of the community live in the town. Mrs. Vesela is 90, and I’m 85. Then there’s one married couple, Dr. [and Mrs.] Braun. He’s from Vrbova. He and his wife have two daughters that are very active in Bratislava, they’re already in university. Dr. Stastny also came to live here, from Trnava. For some time he was also a so-called Rosh Hakol [president of a Jewish community]. There are also a lot of mixed marriages here. On 15th December 2005, we unveiled a memorial to victims of the Holocaust, and at that time we decided that we’d meet there each year in December. An unbelievable number of people come here, non-Jews as well.
The idea of the memorial came about long before that. Sometime around the 1970s they approached me, that they wanted to write about some forgotten architects. I met with Mr. Mrna, who was looking for information on Mr. Weiss. Mr. Weiss was a contemporary of my parents’. By coincidence we had his photograph. He had a list of Jews who’d been deported and hadn’t returned. I looked at it and told him that there was a huge number of people missing. The town should build them a memorial. Piestany, Trnava, Topolcany. Those were Guardist bastions. I couldn’t stop thinking about it, and so I wrote my relatives in Israel, and they sent me a list of Piestany Jews that hadn’t returned. That list was put together right in 1945 at the initiative of Mr. Grünwald from Vrbova.
The idea of the memorial came about long before that. Sometime around the 1970s they approached me, that they wanted to write about some forgotten architects. I met with Mr. Mrna, who was looking for information on Mr. Weiss. Mr. Weiss was a contemporary of my parents’. By coincidence we had his photograph. He had a list of Jews who’d been deported and hadn’t returned. I looked at it and told him that there was a huge number of people missing. The town should build them a memorial. Piestany, Trnava, Topolcany. Those were Guardist bastions. I couldn’t stop thinking about it, and so I wrote my relatives in Israel, and they sent me a list of Piestany Jews that hadn’t returned. That list was put together right in 1945 at the initiative of Mr. Grünwald from Vrbova.
Location
Slovakia
Interview
Heda Ambrova