Avraham Brichta

“We were hiding for about a week or two then he became afraid that they could arrest and kill him. So we traveled to Trnava with fake documents and there we lived until August 1944. There were no exceptions at the time so we had to look for a hideout. That was another miracle or luck. There was certain doctor Neumann who had a practice in Trnava and Smolenice. His nurse’s name was Počúchová and she said she could hide him at her parents’ house. He asked her if they could hide us as well and they agreed to hide us all for three days. And those three days stretched to eight months. Mr. Počúch was a very nice man but he was poor. He had a house in Smolenice with a granary and a yard about hundred and fifty meters wide. We were six people hiding in the granary – our family and doctor Neumann with his wife and his nephew.”

“There are two reasons why the Jews survived, miracles and the good will of other people – I mean Slovak people who were not Jewish. In our case, it was the CEO of Nupod, his name was Dr. Tibor Toth (Roth). My father had an exception and he was in Trnava. He did all he could to save us so he asked Dr. Toth. Dr. Toth had sympathy with us and asked Alexander Mach who served as the ministry of interior at the time and sent a wire to Žilina. We were in the transport and the door was closed. My mother was a great optimist and I got it after her. She said: ‘We are going to get out of the wagon.’ The others were laughing at her. At about five or six o’clock, a soldier came with an official from the Jewish community. They had a document. That was in October 1942. Later I found out that it was the last transport from Slovakia, after that they stopped it.”

“He said that they should let us go. So they called for Melanie Brichtová and Arpád Ivan Brichta, they opened the door for us and we got out. I remembered the first German words I heard: ‘Was ist mit dieses Kind und Frau?’ What’s wrong with this woman and the child? And the Jewish official said: ‘Sie sind irrtümlich genomen.’ They took them by mistake. ‘In Ordnung,’ said the officer. So they let us go and we went to a priest in Topolčany, I think it was a brother of Tibor Toth. We were hiding there for two weeks. We didn’t know the raids were over and that there were no more transports to concentration camps.”