Born Survivors (2 page)

None of those wide-eyed women knew then that one direction meant life while the other could mean something very different. The fate of those who were chosen that day by Mengele remains unknown
.

Josef Mengele represented the greatest risk to Priska’s young life thus far but still she had no concept of what she was soon to face. In the coming months hunger was to become her dreaded enemy, while starvation seemed the likeliest end to her suffering.

Hunger’s cousin – thirst – would torment her just as cruelly during her time in the camps, along with exhaustion, fear and disease. But it was her pregnant body’s gnawing, aching demands for nourishment that very nearly broke her.

Perversely, the one memory that helped Priska through some of her most ravenous pangs was of pressing her nose to the glass of a patisserie on her way to school before treating herself to a sugar-dusted confection such as a cinnamon
babka
with streusel topping. The recollection of breaking apart those flaky pastries as crumbs cascaded down her blouse in the cake shop in Zlaté Moravce summed up her idyllic childhood in what is now the southwestern corner of the Slovak Republic.

One hundred kilometres or so from Bratislava, the region where Priska grew up was known for gold panning, and the name of one of its rivers, the Zlatnanka, derives from the Slovak word for gold.
The town of ‘Golden Moravce’ was almost as prosperous as its title suggested, with an imposing church, schools and streets of shops as well as coffee houses, restaurants and a hotel.

Priska’s parents, Emanuel and Paula Rona, ran one of the most respectable kosher cafés in town, a venue around which much of local life revolved. In a prime location on the central square, the coffee shop also had a pretty courtyard. Emanuel Rona had spotted the business for rent in a newspaper in 1924 when he was in his late thirties. Seeking to make his fortune, he took the bold decision to relocate his wife and children two hundred and fifty kilometres from their remote town of Stropkov in the eastern hills near the Polish border.

Priska, born on Sunday 6 August 1916, was eight years old when they moved, but she returned to Stropkov with her family whenever they could to visit her maternal grandfather David Friedman, a widower who owned a tavern and was a well-known writer of polemical pamphlets.

In Zlaté Moravce the family café was, Priska would later say, beautiful and always kept spotlessly clean by her hard-working parents and a flock of devoted female staff. It boasted a private function room her mother proudly called a
chambre séparée
, in which eight musicians in dark suits would play for the customers whenever she pulled back a curtain. ‘We had great music and wonderful dancers. The cafeteria life was important then. I so terribly loved my youth.’

Her mother, who was four years younger and ‘a head taller’ than her father, was strikingly good-looking and quietly ambitious for her family. Having taken on the traditional Slovak female suffix of –
ová
after her marriage, Paula Ronová proved to be an excellent wife, mother and cook and was ‘an extremely decent woman’ who talked little but thought much. ‘My mother was also my best friend.’

Her father, on the other hand, was a strict disciplinarian who conversed with her mother in German or Yiddish whenever he didn’t want his children to understand. Priska, who picked up
languages easily from an early age, secretly understood every word. Although not zealously observant of the faith he’d been born into, Emanuel Rona appreciated the importance of maintaining appearances and took his family to the synagogue for all the major Jewish holidays.

‘It was terribly important when I was young to behave decently because of the coffee shop,’ said Priska. ‘We had to be a good family, good friends and good owners, or clients wouldn’t have come to the café.’

One of five children, Priska – named Piroska at birth – was fourth in line. Andrej, known as ‘Bandi’, was the eldest. Her sister Elizabeth, known as ‘Boežka’, came next, then Anička, known to all as ‘Little Anna’. Four years after Priska came Eugen, known to all as Janíčko or ‘Janko’, the youngest child. A sixth child had died as an infant in between.

In Zlaté Moravce, the family lived behind the café in an apartment spacious enough for the children to enjoy separate bedrooms. They had a large garden sloping down to a stream that flowed the full width of it. An athletic, outgoing child, Priska frequently swam there with friends who also played tennis in their garden. Healthy and happy, with lustrous dark hair, Priska like her sisters was popular with the local children, who affectionately abbreviated her name to ‘Piri’, or sometimes ‘Pira’.

‘It didn’t matter to me if they were Jews or Gentiles. I was friends with everyone the same. There was no difference.’

She and her siblings grew up surrounded by ‘good women’ who helped with the household chores and acted like surrogate mothers. The family ate well, with kosher meat presented ‘elegantly’ at almost every meal. Succulent roast dinners were often followed by desserts from the café. Priska had a sweet tooth and her favourite was the Viennese
Sachertorte
, a rich chocolate cake made with meringue and apricot jam.

Although they didn’t study religion at school, the children were raised to attend prayers every Friday evening and to wash their
hands thoroughly before sitting down to an elegant
Shabbat
or Sabbath table with special candles and the finest linens.

Priska was one of only six girls in her class of more than thirty. Her sister Boežka was, she said, a ‘true intellectual’ who picked up languages effortlessly, seemingly absorbing them. Books held little interest for Boežka, however, as she was far more interested in artistic matters – especially needlework, at which she shone.

Priska may have had to work harder at her studies than her sister, but she was diligent and education soon became her passion. In her quest for a deeper understanding of the world, she also differed from her prettier sister Anna who preferred dressing up or playing with dolls. ‘I liked that I had knowledge,’ Priska admitted. She became fascinated by Christianity from an early age and often sneaked into the Catholic cemetery in Zlaté Moravce on her way home from school. She especially admired its imposing tombs and mausoleums and was always intrigued by a new ‘arrival’, making up imaginary stories about them and what their lives had been like.

Her mother Paula encouraged her daughter’s thirst for education and was proud when she became the first Rona child to attend the local high school – the Gymnázium Janka Král’a. It was an attractive three-storey white stucco building opened in 1906 opposite the cemetery and town hall. One of five hundred pupils aged between ten and eighteen, Priska studied English and Latin there as well as the obligatory German and French. Her siblings only attended the middle school, apart from her brother Bandi who went to accountancy school.

Competitive by nature, Priska won numerous academic awards and her professors were delighted with her progress. Their star pupil also enjoyed the attention of the boys in her class, who begged her to help them with their English and would congregate devotedly in her garden while she gave lessons. ‘I have nothing but wonderful memories of Zlaté Moravce.’

Priska’s best friend at school was a girl named Gizelle Ondrejkovičová, known to everyone as ‘Gizka’. She was not only beautiful
but popular. The daughter of the district police chief, a Gentile, she wasn’t nearly as studious as Priska, so her father called on Priska’s parents one day to make them an offer. ‘If Priska makes sure that Gizka completes her studies, then I will allow you to keep your café open as late as you like.’ Nor would there be any extra taxes to pay.

And so it was that the fourth Rona child suddenly became vitally important to the modest family business. As long as Priska remained an unofficial tutor to her classmate she would guarantee that their café – above all others in town – would thrive. It was a responsibility she took very seriously and, although it left her little time to enjoy a social life, she adored Gizka and was happy to help. The two friends sat side by side in the same class and eventually graduated together.

After high school, Priska took up teaching and seemed all set for a career as a professor of languages. A keen singer, she joined a teachers’ choir that toured the country performing traditional nationalist songs, one of which proclaimed proudly, ‘I am a Slovak and a Slovak I will remain’ – a tune she would happily break into throughout her life.

In Zlaté Moravce, she remained highly regarded and enjoyed being greeted first by whoever she met in the street – a traditional Slovak sign of respect. She was also wooed by a Gentile professor who called for her every Saturday night to take her for coffee or dancing, or for dinner at the local hotel.

There was little reason for Priska or her family to worry that anything might alter their comfortable way of life. Although Jews had long been persecuted across Europe, and had suffered especially at the hands of the Russians during the pogroms that dated back to the early nineteenth century, they’d settled easily into the newly sculpted nations of Europe after the First World War and the collapse of the German, Austro-Hungarian and Russian Empires. In Czechoslovakia they had risen to prominence and assimilated well into society. Jews not only played a key role in manufacturing and economic life but contributed to every field of culture, science and the arts. New schools and synagogues were built and Jews were at
the centre of café life. The Rona family experienced little anti-Semitism within their own community.

A severe economic depression after the First World War began to change the mood across the border in Germany, however. Adolf Hitler, who since 1921 had been the leader of the Nationalist Socialist German Workers, known as the ‘Nazi’ Party, accused Jews of controlling the nation’s wealth and blamed them for its many woes. After federal elections in 1933, when the Nazis received 17.2 million votes, Hitler was invited into a coalition government and appointed Chancellor. His rise to power marked the end of the democratic Weimar Republic and the beginning of what became widely known as the
Dritte Reich
– the Third Empire.

Hitler’s radical speeches denounced capitalism and condemned those who’d allied themselves with Bolsheviks, Communists, Marxists and the Russian Red Army to participate in revolution. Having written in his 1925 autobiographical manifesto
Mein Kampf
that ‘the personification of the Devil as the symbol of all evil assumes the living shape of the Jew’, he promised to eliminate Jews and other ‘undesirables’ from Germany in what he described as a ‘thorough solution’.

Proclaiming his ‘new order’ to counter what many Germans saw as the injustices forced on them after the war, he encouraged brown-shirted stormtroopers to harass Jews and blockade or boycott their businesses. Cheered on by his indoctrinated Hitler Youth, his battle cry of ‘
Sieg Heil!
’ (Hail Victory!) blared across the airwaves from Berlin. Within a relatively short time, Hitler appeared to be delivering on his promises and brought about such economic recovery that his support only grew. Bolstered by his success, his government began to implement a series of laws to exclude Jews from political, economic and social life. ‘Degenerate’ Jewish books were burned, non-Aryans were expelled from universities, and prominent Jews abroad – including Albert Einstein – were exiled.

As German anti-Semitism escalated, synagogues were desecrated or burned to the ground, sometimes with Jews trapped inside. The pavements of towns and cities glistened with broken
glass and the windows of Jewish businesses were daubed with the Star of David or offensive slogans. Gentiles, who were dubbed ‘Aryans’ by the Nazis were encouraged to inform on Jews and in an atmosphere of betrayal and mistrust, those who’d lived happily alongside each other for years and whose children had grown up together often found themselves being spat at in the street, beaten or arrested. There were willing spies everywhere, eager to denounce their neighbours in the hope of getting their hands on their property. Hundreds of homes were looted systematically by those who burst in and took whatever they wanted.

Native Germans were encouraged to inspect and then help themselves to the most desirable Jewish apartments, forcing entire families to leave their homes at short notice. It was said that the new tenants moved in before ‘the bread from the oven was even cold’. Those evicted were only permitted to move into smaller quarters in the poorest districts, effectively banning them from the life they’d always known.

The physically disabled and mentally ill – Aryans and Jews alike – were declared ‘unworthy of life’ and many were sent away to camps or summarily executed. The rest of the populace had little choice but to conform to the imposition of Hitler’s Nuremberg Laws, mercilessly enforced and calculated to further alienate Jews and others. Under what the Nazis defined as ‘scientific racism’ to maintain the purity of German blood, these regulations singled out the ‘racially acceptable’ and restricted the basic civic rights of ‘Jews, gypsies, negroes and their bastard offspring’. The Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour annulled all mixed marriages and the death penalty was applied to any Jew found to have had sexual relations with a German, in order to avoid ‘racial pollution’.

Jews were stripped of their citizenship and anyone considered ‘asocial’ or ‘harmful’ – a nebulous category that encompassed Communists, political activists, alcoholics, prostitutes, beggars and the homeless, plus Jehovah’s Witnesses, who refused to accept
Hitler’s authority – was arrested and imprisoned in early
Konzentrationslager
or ‘KZ’, usually situated in former army barracks.

Aryans were prohibited from employing Jews. Through incremental changes, Jews were also barred from their own professions as lawyers, doctors or journalists and Jewish children could no longer be educated beyond the age of fourteen. Over time, Jews were banned from state hospitals and not allowed to travel further than thirty kilometres from their homes. Public parks, playgrounds, rivers, swimming pools, beaches and libraries were placed out of bounds. The names of all Jewish soldiers were scratched off First World War memorials, although so many had fought for the Kaiser in the conflict.