Tag #135941 - Interview #99539 (Jozef W.)

My birth father was named Osias W. and was born in 1887. I don’t remember my father, because he died the same year I was born [1916]. I was born in February, and in October he died tragically at the Russian front as a soldier of the Austro-Hungarian Army. What I’m going to tell you now is 100% true. A person who was in the same unit as my father, and was witness to this incredible death told it to my mother.  My father had finished a letter to my mother and put it in a pocket of his uniform. Then he began to clean his rifle. While he was doing that, a man from a neighboring village came to talk to him. The village was named Proc. Because he was illiterate, he wanted my father to write a letter to his mother for him. My father asked him to dictate to him what the letter should say. And while he was dictating, for him to clean the rifle. As he was dictating to my father, he was cleaning the rifle, and accidentally pulled the trigger. He shot my father right in the head, and my father’s blood also soaked the letter that he had written to my mother beforehand. The acquaintance, who survived, brought the letter to my mother. It was then a family relic of ours. I hid this letter and my mother’s last letter during the war as an invaluable remembrance of my parents. In 1944, when I was in the Slovak National Uprising, while marching across the Martin meadows, we stopped to wash at a stream. I put my rucksack down to one side. When I finished washing, I saw that the rucksack had disappeared. Someone had stolen it along with the reminders of my parents.

Apparently my parents’ marriage was arranged. I don’t doubt that they had an Orthodox wedding. All Jewish rules were observed in our family. My mother was an Orthodox Jewess and dressed accordingly. She always wore a wig or a headscarf. On normal weekdays she dressed normally, like the other farmwomen, but during holidays she always dressed up. She also kept a kosher household. Despite her religious convictions, she wasn’t a fanatic; she always said that we’re all people.

As a widow, my mother got a newsstand, but she probably wouldn’t have survived on the newsstand alone. She also had a little general store as well as a little pub. The same as my father’s parents. When she looked at a person and saw that he’d already had enough, she didn’t serve him any more. And I remember that this caused scandals. They’d yell at her: “You Jewess, damn you!