Tag #133111 - Interview #78115 (Magda Frkalova)

My friends had advised me that we shouldn't all live together. So I found them a sublet in one house near the castle. My mother wanted me to take care of her and my brother, it being my obligation. It was a relatively expensive place. Everywhere hung posters that whoever turns in a Jew will get 10,000 crowns, and one lady found my mother suspicious. She was constantly walking around in that outfit, wasn't working anywhere, and lived in that expensive apartment along with my brother. So she informed on them. A Guardist along with another man came to see my mother at the apartment. They interrogated my mother and everything would perhaps have turned out fine, if they wouldn't have made my brother take off his pants. They saw that he was circumcised, and immediately all was betrayed. It was immediately clear that their papers were false, and that they were Jews.

Then everything took place quickly. At the Gestapo they asked my mother where her husband and her other children were. So she told them that her husband had already been taken away, and that her daughter was in Bratislava. She didn't know where I lived, but my brother knew. I'd told him, because my mother had pressured both of us, that if we were going to keep everything from her, she'd jump under a streetcar. So my brother softened me up me and I told him my address. I shouldn't have done that. They would never have found me. But at the Gestapo they began to beat him, and he told them where I lived. It was already nighttime, and I heard some steps coming up the stairs. I heard the jackboots kicking. It was midnight, and I knew that they were looking for me. I'll never forget that date: it was 13th October 1944.