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Gradually they Aryanized our dispatch company. The Aryanizer, though, didn’t at all understand how to run the company, so he needed my father and uncle, and that’s why they received an exception called ‘economically important Jew’. Up until the [Slovak] Uprising [10] we more or less still kept our heads above the water. The uprising broke out the summer that I was on summer vacation at our relatives’ in Sucany. Our relative came from Zilina. They sent him to Sucany to practice as a doctor. After the uprising broke out, my parents sent this one boy of about 20 to bring me back home. We barely managed to leave, because the front ran through that region. Only with great difficulties did I manage to return to my parents. We then immediately left Zilina. We set out to some relatives’ place in Zlate Moravce. My parents guessed that the Germans wouldn’t be there yet. During the train trip we found out that they were already there. We got off the train in Piestany. In Piestany I lived through the time from the beginning of the uprising in 1944 until liberation.
In Piestany we moved into the Hotel Pro Patria. We wanted to stay there as guests of the spa, but someone warned us that there was going to be a raid there. So we quickly packed our things and moved to the Hotel Eden. Later my mother told me about the raid at the Hotel Pro Patria, that people were jumping out of windows to save themselves. There were a lot of Jews there. We were in the Eden only temporarily and my parents looked for other alternatives.
My mother’s brother Oskar was married to an Aryan woman. In a mixed marriage my uncle Oskar was protected. His wife was our guardian angel. She always brought us some money, because wherever a person hid, it was necessary to pay well. They found us a contact, a person that had at one time had a bicycle shop in Zilina. In Piestany he lived in an old house. We only stayed with them for a couple of weeks, because the conditions there were horrible. His wife regularly went to Bratislava to a German officers’ club. She was a prostitute. They had one child at home that had been born as a result of these activities of hers. It was only a couple of months old, and she didn’t take care of it at all. She also had a daughter who was a bit older. My mother took care of the household and of those children.
In Piestany we moved into the Hotel Pro Patria. We wanted to stay there as guests of the spa, but someone warned us that there was going to be a raid there. So we quickly packed our things and moved to the Hotel Eden. Later my mother told me about the raid at the Hotel Pro Patria, that people were jumping out of windows to save themselves. There were a lot of Jews there. We were in the Eden only temporarily and my parents looked for other alternatives.
My mother’s brother Oskar was married to an Aryan woman. In a mixed marriage my uncle Oskar was protected. His wife was our guardian angel. She always brought us some money, because wherever a person hid, it was necessary to pay well. They found us a contact, a person that had at one time had a bicycle shop in Zilina. In Piestany he lived in an old house. We only stayed with them for a couple of weeks, because the conditions there were horrible. His wife regularly went to Bratislava to a German officers’ club. She was a prostitute. They had one child at home that had been born as a result of these activities of hers. It was only a couple of months old, and she didn’t take care of it at all. She also had a daughter who was a bit older. My mother took care of the household and of those children.
Location
Slovakia
Interview
Judita Schvalbova