The next day after my election, my wife, two school-age daughters and I were woken early in the morning by the merciless ringing of the doorbell at our East German apartment. At the door stood representatives of our embassy, a member of the NKVD [50] and the last was the aforementioned reporter of the Soviet ‘Pravda’ whom I had defeated in the election. They claimed that my election to the function of deputy chairman of the West German ‘Presseverein’ had been manipulated. They insisted that I give up the position. I recommended to them that they should kindly verify how the correspondents from the RVHP countries voted. For my colleagues from the Soviet Union had boasted to me that they had as one voted for me. Further, I told them to kindly go see all of the about thirty members of the West German Foreign Press Club, and ask them if they agree with a review of yesterday’s elections. For a while our uninvited guests still tried to convince me to give up the position in favor of the ‘Pravda’ correspondent, that it’s after all my duty from a standpoint of international comradeship. But when they didn’t succeed, they left without any further threats. For in Czechoslovakia, the Prague Spring – both meteorological and political – was beginning.
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ladislav porjes
I also became a member of the ‘Presseverein’ – the Foreign Press Club in West Berlin. For me, as a foreigner and journalist, the otherwise impermeable Berlin Wall was permeable day or night. It was enough to show the East German border guards at ‘Checkpoint Charlie’ a foreign press card, and the barriers lifted. On the other side, the West German border guards saluted, and that was it. For me the Foreign Press Club was not only a source of important information, but also a place of interesting encounters.
After being away for two hours I returned again to our pavilion. There my friends told me that after my departure a frantic search had broken out. Members of Ulbricht’s bodyguard, agents of the ‘Stasi’ secret state security, and officials from the East German foreign ministry were all furiously looking for me. Finally the Germans found me – they pleaded and then threateningly asked me to give them the tape in question. When they found out that I had already transmitted it from the Leipzig studio to Prague an hour ago, they started dragging me to a phone, for me to immediately call Prague Radio, that due to the highest interests of state the interview cannot be broadcast, for comrade Chairman had let out something he shouldn’t have, that premature disclosure of his flight to Prague could seriously endanger his security. I had to tell them that I was sorry, but that my interview with Ulbricht, as an exceptional breaking news item, had already been broadcast twice by Prague Radio.
In October of 1964 I accepted an offer from Czechoslovak Radio, and left for Berlin for four years as a permanent reporter and correspondent. I felt it as satisfaction that after years of persecution the comrades had finally deemed me worthy of representing our country abroad. I was a little afraid of how, after my stay in Auschwitz, I would adapt among the former ‘supermen,’ but everything turned out well.
After three months of my mission I returned to Prague. At the secretariat of the Communist Party Central Committee they judged my news of the Hungarian events to not be bolshevik enough, and ‘excessively objectivistic.’ Another reason for my persecution was the accusation that I was a ‘capitalist’: someone had made up a story that I and my brother had allegedly owned a shirt factory in Kosice. Already back then the regime was beginning to be truly absurd – as I had never had a brother, I was unfortunately an only child. And I had never owned any factory, I had always bought my shirts at the store.
I found Budapest considerably damaged by Soviet tanks. The events in Hungary were a manifold tragedy. A destroyed infrastructure, no small loss of life and also the remnants of any illusions about the socialist system. They induced the exodus of hundreds of thousands of citizens, who with their children and bit of luggage crossed over to neighboring Austria, which willingly opened its borders to them.
As I was the only one at the radio station in Prague that spoke Hungarian, and as the Budapest radio didn’t have any regular correspondent, I was chosen as the ‘war’ correspondent. It wasn’t a very lucrative job, plus I had to leave my terrified wife at home with our two little daughters, but my desire to prove myself was stronger. So in October of 1956 I boarded a special army plane in Prague. The Czechoslovak embassy sent a car for me, which took me to a hotel for foreigners. I had brought a practical leather coat with me for the foul fall weather. My clothing, seemingly so practical, was however soon to become my greatest handicap. For I didn’t suspect that leather coats were somewhat of a uniform of the otherwise plainclothes members of the Hungarian secret police. The rebels of course despised them, often they hunted them like wild game, caught and tied they poured diesel or gasoline over them, and like this hung them head down from the street lamps, so that they would slowly roast over fires that they built under the lamps.
They fired me from the radio service in 1951 for alleged Zionism [39]. So I then worked as a part-time night watchman and receptionist at the Hotel Alcron on Wenceslaus Square. Everyone except for me wore a uniform, but I refused to wear that monkey suit! I told them how many languages I knew, and for each one I got a premium – but it wasn’t that easy, they summoned some teacher who tested me whether I really knew the languages. Because they thought that I was making it up: I told them that I spoke English, German, French, Polish, Spanish, Hungarian, Yiddish and could understand Hebrew. When they found out that I did know them all, they had to pay me a premium of about 60 crowns a month for each language.
At the beginning of June 1947 I married a ‘goyte’ girl, Vlasta [Porjesova, nee Krestanova], whom I had met in Prague. She came with me to Michalovce, where my grandma, who survived the Holocaust in a ‘bunker,’ became very fond of her.
I abandoned my Germanic studies after three semesters, because a lack of money and the war trauma had deprived me of the ability to concentrate. My wartime ordeals were constantly coming back to me. I suffered from post-traumatic stress. At night I had terrible dreams, and screamed horribly while sleeping. For several months I had the same dream over and over again: I was running, they caught me, stuck me into a pit and were shooting at me. It took several months before I got rid of this nightmare.
After a short spell in the so-called radio-services of Rude Pravo [29] in Prague and after temporary stints in Kosice and in Bratislava, I became the head of the Prague office of “Pravda” [30], from which I was then fired during the time of the trials of Rudolf Slansky and et. al. [see Slansky trial] [31] as an alleged Zionist and cosmopolitan.
Riva resolutely refused all my attempts, and not that they were few. She spoke, the words streamed out of her, but I was struck dumb in horror. She had survived Auschwitz, was one of ten, one of that one percent of that first transport of young Slovak Jewesses, who had stayed alive. But at what price!
She was saved by a Blockältester with a green triangle, a former murderer, who brutally raped her, a virgin, and then passed over to a member of the SS. “He promoted me to capo in the women’s camp – continued Riva, but before that he had his friend, an SS doctor, sterilize me so that I wouldn’t become pregnant. And then passed me further on to his friends for sexual orgies. Occasionally I got a present for it, some women’s underwear in decent condition, a loaf of bread, a can of meat, some cookies, a packet of coffee, or even a small pack of cigarettes. I shared the food and smokes with the women in my blockhouse, the underwear I usually kept for myself. I know what you’re thinking now: you’re thinking that I’m a whore, that I’m a hyena, that they pulled the underwear from some girl who then went up the chimney.
She was saved by a Blockältester with a green triangle, a former murderer, who brutally raped her, a virgin, and then passed over to a member of the SS. “He promoted me to capo in the women’s camp – continued Riva, but before that he had his friend, an SS doctor, sterilize me so that I wouldn’t become pregnant. And then passed me further on to his friends for sexual orgies. Occasionally I got a present for it, some women’s underwear in decent condition, a loaf of bread, a can of meat, some cookies, a packet of coffee, or even a small pack of cigarettes. I shared the food and smokes with the women in my blockhouse, the underwear I usually kept for myself. I know what you’re thinking now: you’re thinking that I’m a whore, that I’m a hyena, that they pulled the underwear from some girl who then went up the chimney.
My request to be discharged from the army was granted. I left for Prague and managed to apply for the Faculty of Philosophy at Charles University. I was still wearing my uniform, because I hadn’t had the time to find civilian clothes. But after my arrival in Prague, one more unwanted goodbye to the army still awaited me – two days after my arrival, they unexpectedly, and actually illegally, called me up into some honorary unit, which was supposed to present itself to the officials of the government and Party at the time. Directly in front of our unit, on a wooden tribunal, sat the Minister of Information, Vaclav Kopecky [27]. Back then I wasn’t as hard of hearing as I am now, and so I heard exactly what he was saying to his son: ‘See, Ivanek, those are our heroes.’ But then he paused, stood up, came a bit closer, had a better look at us, and says to the Minister of the Interior, Nosek [28], who was standing next to him: ‘Quite the sight, huh? Jew-boys everywhere again!’ Unfortunately I later heard similar utterances many times.
From Kromeriz I moved to Litomerice. There I in particular participated in the hunt for Hitler’s orphaned youth, named the ‘Wehrwolf.’ At night they would illegally cross the at that time still sparsely guarded borders, and torch or burgle houses. With wicks and incendiary weapons they terrorized and even killed local citizens – especially old men, women and children. Once we tried out on them a method that the SS in Auschwitz had used to terrify us. We stood a captured ‘Wehrwolf’ blindfolded against a wall, one of us stood behind him and hit him in the head with a stick. While at the same time another one of us fired a salvo into the air from a machine gun.
When they saw how disappointed I was, they at least gave me a uniform to wear. Then, when they found out that I knew several foreign languages, plus Yiddish and also Russian, which I had learned in the camps, they sent me to Krakow to the Allied American-Soviet-British military mission. There I served for the next several months as a translator and interpreter during the interrogation of captured German officers, or disoriented liberated prisoners.
At the dawn of the fourth day of our escape, during the three preceding nights we could have walked at the most several dozen kilometers, we were alarmed in our thistly hiding place by a warning shout “Hands up, or I’ll shoot!” Luckily our fright didn’t last long, because we immediately realized that the command wasn’t given in German, but in for us so sweet-sounding Russian. We stood, ragged and pitiful, face to face with two Soviet spies. While they were aiming their machine guns at us, they were also unbelievingly and mainly suspiciously staring at our hitherto unfamiliar striped “uniforms.” Though both Russians hadn’t yet seen a “Häftling,” they did have their experiences with SS scoundrels, disguised in all manner of things from farmer’s shirts to prison uniforms. That’s also why they at first didn’t believe our clothing, nor our Russian and painstaking accents, gained more from fellow Soviet prisoners in the camp than from the last two years of academic high school. They even hesitated when they saw the numbers tattooed on our forearms, and searched for another compulsory SS blood type tattoo, even under our arms. Only when they didn’t find them, and felt our emaciated skeletons, did they hang their machine guns on their shoulders, made a fire and offered us bread with speck and rolled ham from an opened can.
I worked in a commando that went outside of the camp, and we built so-called cowsheds. I dragged long, heavy beams on my shoulders. One day the cowshed was built, the next day we tore it down – so this ‘work’ of ours was pure and utter bullying. I got sores on the back of my neck from carrying the beams, I had a vitamin deficiency, and got into the infirmary.
In Birkenau about 40 of us men slept in a wooden bunkhouse, we slept under a ragged blanket. In the winter we heated a bit with a small stove. My typical day in the camp consisted of us waking up in the morning in the barracks and getting breakfast, which was made up of so-called tea, a slice of bread, accompanied by a teaspoon of artificial honey or artificial jam. That’s what the Germans called breakfast, on this miserable ration we had to work until lunch.
Olda gripped a knife in his hand and took a step towards Marek. The others stepped aside out of his way. Markel sank to his knees and pleaded with Olda to not kill him, that he’s got a wife and children, all right, we can do what we want, that he won’t tell. So we again began to saw at the wall. Suddenly in the distance the lights of a station were shining, brakes squealed – we were arriving at the Zilina train station. The door opened, an arm thrust a pail of water inside, a voice benevolently asked: ‘Alles in Ordnung?’ [‘Everything OK?’] It was a decent person, a field constable from the former Austria, which was now called Ostmark. So there was nothing to be afraid of. When no one answered, the voice said: ‘Na also, gute Nacht.’ [‘Well, goodnight then!’] With a grating sound the door began to slowly close. Everything looked hopeful. But suddenly a voice piped up from the depths of the dark wagon. It was Markel. ‘Herr Kommandant! Es ist nicht alles in Ordnung.’ [‘Mr. Commander, actually things are not quite all right.’] The door opened again. Markel told him that there were people here that wanted to escape. He didn’t want to reveal who. He said only, that it was dark, he didn’t see anything, but he’d heard whispering and the sound of a saw drilling through the wall of the wagon.
I served the remainder of my sentence and was transported to the Sered [labor] camp [19], from which I was sent to Auschwitz.
But the idyll lasted for only two days. For on the third day the attending physician – a young, sympathetic and intelligent-looking person – invited me into his office. He says to me, ‘Tell me, what do you think we found in your sperm under the microscope?’ It was clear to me that my days in the idyllic hospital atmosphere were numbered. Nevertheless, I smartly said, ‘Of course I know, the clap!’ The doctor smiled, ‘We found two crowns’ worth of government-issue soap. And now please take off your pants.’ He carefully examined my organ, shrunken with fear. For a moment his gaze stopped at the circumcision cut. Then he quietly says, ‘You’re a Jew, aren’t you? How much longer are you supposed to be in for?’ I said that for five months more. The doctor says, ‘That’s quite a bit. And would it help you if we left you here for two or three weeks? We can’t have you here for any longer, because a real cure for the clap doesn’t last longer than that. Just to be sure you’ll come see me twice a week, as if for a checkup, so that it doesn’t look suspicious.’ I thanked him from the bottom of my heart. Those three weeks in the Ruzomberk army hospital are my most pleasant memory of the six years that Tiso’s Slovak State lasted.
I put it in the toilet to cool off, and was looking forward to eating it in peace, finally for once like a civilized person. About five minutes later, when I was getting ready to begin eating the soup, the guard appeared again and yelled at me to return everything. He pushed me aside and carried away both bowls of food, still full. I remembered that, and the next time stuffed myself with hot potatoes, and burned my throat with boiling soup. There was no other way; otherwise I would have again gone hungry all day. Because we didn’t get any supper. At night a bright light bulb in the ceiling shone constantly, and every little while the guard’s eye watched me through the spy-hole in the door.
There were thirty of us, but there were only twenty blankets, so we had to artfully arrange them so that we’d all be covered. At night that meant that when one turned, everyone had to turn with him, because otherwise we wouldn’t all fit under the blankets. It took me a while to get used to it. I got a few cuffs on the head from my fellow sleepers and then I got used to it. After a night like that, I would get up in the morning all stiff and sleepy. There were bedbugs everywhere, and the air was unbreathable due to the open pail and the peas we’d had for supper.
But what happened was that I was informed on by a former member of the Sixth Labor Battalion, who was in the pay of the Secret Police as an informer. He identified me as an escapee, found and denounced me to the Guardists. All of a sudden they caught me in the street, I defended myself and shouted what do they think they’re doing, but they told me to shut up. They took me in and started interrogating me. I insisted that I was the person identified in my papers. They told me that if I’m claiming to be a Slovak, to take off my pants, so they could make sure that I’m not a Jew. I told them that it was pointless, that I had been operated on due to a foreskin infection. I got a cuff. They were yelling at me, that no Slovak would carry so many documents on him. Let alone a confirmation of surgery. They were right in that, my big mistake was that I hadn’t listened to the warning at the Bratislava Jewish community, to never carry my papers all together. They beat me up and dragged me with other prisoners, in chains, through Bratislava. They stopped traffic and dragged us through the streets like animals. Those more sympathetic would stop and slip us chocolate or a fiver. So that’s how I got into military prison in Poprad.
I found work through an ad – in the paper they wrote that some German Reich fruit preserves and jam company, with a branch plant in Bratislava, was looking for a German-Slovak translator. I set out for the address listed in the ad, introduced myself under my false name, and said that I was interested in the job. Some German was sitting in the office, he tested my translating abilities, and immediately hired me. I worked there twice a week, each time for about two or three hours. My salary was a thousand crowns a month – at that time the crown still had almost its pre-war value, so I came by some very decent money.
I lived in Bratislava on false Aryan papers. False papers were issued illegally by either Protestant or Greek Catholic priests who were against the Fascist regime. They helped Jews, issued them false birth certificates. I, however, set out for the Bratislava Jewish community.
I’d call my youth a time of constant escapes. Circumstances were to blame. To tell the truth, I ran away from wherever it was possible, or I at least tried to run away. Just from Svaty Jur I escaped twice. The second time I ran away was after they threatened us with transport to the Ukrainian front. There we were supposed to help the so-called Special Units of the Hlinka Guard, deployed side by side with the SS, to clear minefields. So at that time I became a deserter wanted by the police, because the Sixth Labor Battalion fell under the Ministry of Defense.
So I returned, disappointed, to Svaty Jur. I paid for my escape with fourteen days in jail with no supper. The punishment was surprisingly mild, because the command took the fact I had returned voluntarily after 48 hours as a mitigating circumstance. As far as Kutzush goes, he never returned to the camp, nor did they catch him. He survived the war with partisans in a bunker in the forest, after the war he became a hotel manager in Bratislava, and died in the 1980s.
My girl, Riva Halperova, was also destined for this girls’ transport, scheduled to leave from the Zemplin regional center of Michalovce. She was 19, she had attended home economics school in Uzhorod, and we had been going out together before I left for the labor camp.
After graduation I couldn’t study due to the Nuremberg laws, and so I decided to go to Michalovce to apprentice as a locksmith. However, before I could finish, I was called up to the so-called Sixth Labor Battalion – as Tiso’s ‘Slovak State’ had decided to resolve the problem of young Jews in two phases: firstly to use up their manpower to the last drop in labor camps, secondly to load them onto cattle wagons and entrust their final liquidation to a foreign territory, ‘Generalgouvernement Polen,’ its German protectors.