Katarína Bendová, rod. Skalová

“Once my uncle wasn´t at home, but was searching for some food. The family had nothing to eat and were hidden in a basement, when the house was bombed. When my uncle came back, the family was gone; it was buried in the basement, in the debris of the house. And he literally said this to my mom, that he himself had dug them out with his fingers. They all survived. The basement wasn´t destroyed and he saved them as well as others from the house.”

“In Žilina I experienced one thing I shall never forget – the first transports from Eastern Slovakia to Auschwitz. People locked in cattle cars were laid up to some side rail and no one could get closer to them. We were pupils back then, carrying full baskets of groceries and water, and the people screamed from those little windows: ‘Give us some water, give us water!’ It was warm outside, they weren´t hungry yet, but just very thirsty. It was April or May 1942. And they asked us – the school kids from a Jewish school – to go to these cattle cars and carry food and water to these people, whereas our parents weren´t supposed to find out about that. And we managed it and handed food through the windows. The Hlinka´s Guard watched them very closely, but since we were children, they didn´t harm us. They didn´t look at us kindly, but they let us be. Those were the first transports of young girls and boys, about 16 – 17 years old, only a little older than we were. Thus there was still a big risk we might have been shoved in as well. Fortunately, we all survived it. I will never forget how they looked from behind those bars and tried to reach for the water we were passing them. Although we didn´t know exactly, we sensed what was going to happen with them. I shall never forget that. That´s not something one can ever forget.”