Born Survivors (4 page)

Priska and Tibor marry in the synagogue in Bratislava 1941

The couple were married on Saturday 21 June 1941 at the twin-towered Moorish-style synagogue in Bratislava. The bride, who was twenty-five years old, wore a long white coat, a white pillbox hat, pearls and white shoes with a patterned dress. She carried a bouquet of white gladioli as she agreed to the
ketubah
or Jewish marriage
contract. Her groom, who was twenty-seven, wore a hat and smart suit with the fashionable baggy trousers of the time.

Priska’s parents, Emanuel and Paula, who declared their son-in-law ‘perfect’, gave the couple their blessing and were delighted to have something to celebrate. Tibor’s parents weren’t at the wedding. His father had committed suicide at his farm near Püchov earlier that year, leaving his mother alone. Distraught, he’d returned home to be with her but then had to come back to Bratislava or risk arrest for being away from his registered address without permission. Priska and her parents became his new family.

It was a happy union and the newlyweds were well matched. ‘We never even quarrelled once,’ Priska said, describing her husband as ‘sensational’. She liked that he spoke Slovak ‘correctly’, which many people didn’t; often they blended it with German or Hungarian. ‘He was wonderful to me and so impressed that I’d mastered all those languages. I have beautiful memories of my Tiborko. Such a good husband you couldn’t wish for in your life.’

But the further reverberations of war overshadowed their happiness. On the day after their wedding, the Germans invaded the Soviet Union as part of Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa to seize Russian territories. Still hoping for the best, and completely unprepared for what lay ahead, Priska and Tibor moved into an apartment at 7 Rybárska Brána, later known as Fischertorgasse, just off the main square of Hlavné Námestie. They lived there very happily in spite of the threats they continued to face. Eager to start a family regardless, Priska became pregnant straight away and the couple were delighted. With a child on the way, Tibor was even more grateful that he had a steady income. He even managed to keep his job in September 1941 when all Jews in Slovakia were faced with a list of nearly three hundred new rules to abide by, in something the Germans called the Jewish Code or
Židovský Kódex
.

This code, which officially defined Jews on racial grounds, reinstated a centuries-old practice of forcing Jews to wear humiliating
emblems that had been instituted in places as far afield as England and Baghdad since the ninth century. Everyone of Jewish origin was obliged to have their passports and other documents stamped with a large ‘J’, for the German word
Jude
. They also had to buy armbands or stars, which were cut from huge bolts of pre-stamped cloth made in the very factories where many had once earned their living. Each emblem had to be sewn front and back on to all outer garments, but was primarily to be worn over their Jewish hearts.

Public persecution of Jews increased with their new visibility. Not only were their shops and businesses continually vandalised or looted, they faced danger each time they left the sanctuary of their homes. Many of Tibor and Priska’s friends paid huge sums of money to acquire false papers but they were at enormous risk if caught. Tibor’s employer managed to secure his exemption from wearing a star and many other restrictions, but Priska had no such protection. Each time they stepped out together after curfew or went somewhere Jews were banned, she’d hold her handbag or turn the lapel of her coat in such a way that none could see her star.

Then, not long after the imposition of the new rules, Jews were instructed to leave the centre of Bratislava and move to the poorer suburbs. Priska managed to find a job teaching in a primary school twenty kilometres away in the small town of Pezinok. Tibor commuted into Bratislava each day, leaving at 6 a.m. ‘He loved his job and then he had to work because I was expecting a baby.’ Priska’s parents, grandfather and sister Boežka managed to remain in Bratislava in an apartment on the banks of the Danube where Boežka continued working as a seamstress. And so this close-knit family continued to cope and to hope.

Priska taught at the primary school until the day the authorities decreed that all non-Aryans were forbidden from teaching Aryan children. Having said a fond farewell to her pupils, she insisted she was fortunate because an Englishman who ran a local language school invited her to teach there instead, and she was able to earn
more than before. ‘I had options. I had very many private students who still came to me so it was as if nothing had happened. I did not suffer. They paid me and I had that to live on.’

Determined to help other families less fortunate than hers, she also continued to teach many of her former students for free, reading to them from German, French and English classics.

Then one day she lost her baby.

While the couple quietly grieved, daily life became steadily more difficult as the Nazi codes were ever more rigorously applied. The authorities forced Jews to catalogue all their silver, art, jewellery and other property, which they then had to deliver to local banks to be confiscated. Furs and their finest winter clothing followed. They were banned from keeping pets and had to deliver any cats, dogs, rabbits or caged birds to collecting centres, never to be seen again.

The Slovak State under Father Tiso became one of the first Axis partners to consent to SS
Aktionen
, deportations of Jews to new ‘resettlement areas’ or labour camps to aid the German war effort in the East. In return for the right not to lose its Aryan citizens to such places, the government agreed to pay five hundred
Reichsmark
for every Jew the Nazis deported across its border. In exchange, the Nazis assured the authorities that those ‘parasites’ that were ‘resettled’ would never return or make claim on any property they’d left behind. In the midst of this oppressive atmosphere, tens of thousands were rounded up by the Slovak
gardista
and other militia to be ‘concentrated’ at labour barracks within Slovakia – chiefly at Sered’, Vyhne and Novaky.

Several thousand inmates remained in the new camps, manufacturing vital goods for the German war effort, but an estimated 58,000 were sent on to forced labour camps further east as part of what the Nazis called the
Osttransport
. By ‘East’, it was assumed the camps would be close to armaments factories within occupied Poland where inmates would work in return for food and shelter. Some were promised work gathering in the harvest or helping to set up new Jewish states.

Abandoned and helpless, the Slovak Jews resigned themselves to what seemed to be an increasingly bleak fate. They expected harsh conditions and general privations but prayed that once the war was over normal life could resume. Entire families volunteered to go with those sent ahead, thinking it would be better to remain together. Others promised to send money, letters and food parcels, fully believing that these items would reach their intended destination.

In March 1942, almost nine months to the day after her wedding and around the time that she had hoped to be celebrating the birth of her first child, Priska heard that her eldest sister Boežka had been rounded up in one of the
Aktionen
after the Slovak authorities agreed to supply 1,000 healthy single women. Learning of Boežka’s fate, Priska hurried to the railway terminal in Bratislava to try to rescue her. It was an act that could very easily have cost her life. She found the crowded passenger train almost ready to depart but could see no sign of her sister amongst the sea of frightened and bewildered faces. ‘I didn’t know any of the
gardistas
but I begged them to let my sister go. They yelled at me and told me, “If you’re single, get on the train! If you’re married, then go home!” I was surprised they didn’t just leave me (at the station) but they didn’t.’

The feared Slovak
Hlinka
Guards in their distinctive black uniforms, many of whom had been trained by the SS, arrested Priska and locked her in jail overnight. Her distraught husband Tibor, who’d had no idea where she was, eventually received a message the following morning: ‘Come and get your wife. She’s a trouble-maker.’ Tibor went to the police station and persuaded the authorities to let him take Priska home without penalty, but he was so angry at what she had risked that he refused to speak to her – although only for half a day, so upset was his young wife that she hadn’t been able to rescue sweet Boežka.

Not long afterwards, Priska became pregnant again. Once more, even though their lives seemed to be disintegrating around them, the couple were overjoyed. Neither of them fully appreciated the
danger they were in as, during the following weeks, the authorities continued to carry out lightning raids on Jewish homes to round up people for the transports, a thousand at a time. Once, when Priska’s parents heard jackboots in the hallway, they leapt from a window and managed to escape.

On 17 July 1942, they weren’t so lucky. Powerless against the chain of command that presided over life and death, Emanuel and Paula Rona were snatched without warning. Priska didn’t even know that they’d gone until it was too late. They were in their mid-fifties and she never even had the chance to say goodbye. As with her sister, Priska couldn’t save them. Nor could she save the second baby she then miscarried. ‘I felt then that I should go East too,’ she said. ‘Nothing mattered to me.’

Tibor discovered that his mother, Berta, had also been transported from her home near Püchov to a camp in Polish Silesia. She was elderly and alone. For all he knew, he was now an orphan. Priska learned from childhood contacts such as Gizka that most of the Jewish population of Zlaté Moravce had vanished too, including friends and relatives.

It no longer seemed to matter that her parents had been able to give Gizka their most precious things for safekeeping. The best friend whom she’d tutored through high school had risked her life by hiding the family belongings. With her parents and sister gone and her other siblings scattered, though, Priska wondered what a few bone china dishes or silver cutlery would mean after the war if there was no one left to sit at their Sabbath table.

Her sister Anna had been helped by Gentile friends to escape to the relative safety of the High Tatra Mountains, where she worked as a waitress under her assumed name and lived with their mother’s brother, Dr Gejza Friedman, a pulmonology specialist at a sanatorium for sufferers from tuberculosis. He also took in his eighty-three-year-old father David Friedman, Priska’s grandfather, who’d been left alone after her parents were taken. Anna’s son Otto, aged eleven, was hidden by Catholic nuns. Her oldest brother
Bandi was safe in Mandatory Palestine. Janko had defected from his Jewish work unit and joined the partisans to organise raids on the
Hlinka
Guards and take part in actions aimed at undermining the pro-German government. They had not heard from him in months.

Rekindling her early interest in Christianity, Priska was baptised into the evangelical faith in the hope that it might save her. Tibor, who’d been raised in a more observant Jewish household, didn’t believe it would. Both of them continued to observe the basic Jewish traditions. In spite of the huge uncertainty surrounding them – or perhaps because of it – his wife became pregnant again, but miscarried this infant as well.

By the autumn of 1942, the transports East had been halted by the Slovak authorities. The political and religious elite and the Jewish underground had formed an organisation called the Bratislava Working Group, which placed enormous pressure on Tiso’s government once they suspected that the majority of the 58,000 Jews it had deported had been sent to their death. More than 7,000 of them were children.

For the next two years, after the Slovak government reconsidered its position and refused to deport its remaining 24,000 Jews, those left behind remained relatively safe. There were frantic efforts by the Working Group to save the Jews for ever by bribing key figures in the regime. They even negotiated directly with the SS and with
Hauptsturmführer
Dieter Wislieceny, the Nazis’ Slovak advisor on Jewish affairs, offering millions of Reichs marks worth of gold. Called the ‘Europa Plan’, these negotiations stalled when Wislieceny was transferred. In the interim, though, they had created an easing of anti-Semitic laws and a reduction in persecution, although a sense of foreboding still pervaded.

Thanks to Tibor’s job and Priska’s tutoring, they were able to return to Bratislava and moved into an apartment in Edlova Strasse. Although they experienced rationing and restrictions on when and where they could shop, they were well fed compared with thousands
across Europe. Whenever Priska’s sweet tooth tormented her they would share a cake at their new favourite coffee house, the historic Štefánka Café.

Like most of their friends, Jewish and Gentile, they tried not to worry too much about the future and pinned their hopes on the war ending soon. By 1943, it certainly seemed to be swinging in favour of the Allies. The few radios allowed reported that there had been successful uprisings in Poland and that the Red Army was slowly taking control. The Germans had lost Stalingrad after a brutal five-month campaign. The Allies had seized Libya, forcing the Afrika Korps to surrender. Italy had declared war on Germany and Berlin was being evacuated of civilians. Could there be an end in sight, they wondered, or would the situation only worsen?