Giora Amir

“The Zionist movements fought for every child. We found Jewish children in convents, and they often did not remember at all that they were Jewish children, and we found children who had come back, such as my two classmates who had come back, and they parents have died. The youth movement gave them a Zionist alternative. There was a struggle for every person. Do you want to stay in Slovakia? Communists promise equality to you… Or: They are now fighting for the Jewish state in Palestine, and that’s another alternative. People had to decide at that time. They youth movement had a decisive influence on my wife and on me and others who have decided for the Zionist alternative.”

“On the outside, we were very orthodox Jews and my father was not too happy about my sister’s joining Hashomer Hatzair. He convinced me to go to the summer camp organized by Bnei Akiva, because youth movements were organizing summer camps. Bnei Akiva was a religious Zionist youth movement. Hashomer Hatzair organized a summer camp in Levočské Kúpele at that time and Bnei Akiva held the same camp in Baldovce. Baldovce is a spa, too, in eastern Slovakia. It was already in 1939, a very problematic year, and they already set our tents on fire.”

“Since we were an orthodox family, I attended a Jewish people’s school, where profane subjects were being taught in the mornings, and after lunch we would go to cheder. Cheder means a room in Hebrew, but it also signifies a school for religious matters. I started going there in 1934 when I was six years old and I completed the ordinary school in 1939. We were no longer allowed to study at grammar schools at that time; my sister was already studying at a grammar school, though, but we were not allowed to enrol there, because there was numerus clausus. Numerus clausus meant that four percent of students could be Jews, but those four percent were being set aside for Jews who decided to be baptized.”

“The day when we ate the last lentils that we had was the most dramatic day of my persecution. Somebody knocked on the door. I always say that knocking on the door is a proof of civilization. You kick into a bunker; usually, they often kicked the door. But that day somebody knocked on the door. I opened the door of the bunker – the partisans had already gone to the mountains at that time in order to cross over to the other side, behind the war front, and their bunker remained empty – and so I opened the door and there was a man in a uniform in front of me, and he wore a white coat over his uniform and he saluted to me and said: ‘I am captain Zachar from the Czechoslovak Army and who are you?’ It was in the mountains, two thousand meters high. When I explained to him who we were, there was a long line of soldiers standing behind him.”