Helena Borská

* 1927

Vězeň nacistického koncentračního tábora, Holocaust
Vypuknutí 2. světové války, Transporty do koncentračních táborů, Osvobození koncentračních táborů
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    Schindler saved our lives

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    “The commander of our "camp", of the 1,200 people who were there, Leibhold, he was a really bad guy. But not in a way he would shot people down. He requested discipline and punished people when they were doing something against his rules. At times he punched or kicked someone, what he considered to be reasonable. I heard there was an order to liquidate us; Russian prisoners of war were already digging graves for us. But Schindler rescued us. There were many rumors about him - that he was in American intelligence service; we glorified him, we regarded him as the almighty one. However it is also a fact, that everything he had done, he achieved thanks to money, which he mainly had from Jews. They hoped the money might have redeemed their lives. Schindler sent a fake telegram to Leibhold, that he was called out to an important meeting in Prague. He left and he could not return back, thus this way Schindler saved our lives. The order to liquidate us never came true.”

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    She heard people were killed for nothing

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    “I remember a story, I was told: It happened in a house where my grandmother lived. It was the house with a porch, where toilettes were outside of the flat used by people from the whole house. It was already forbidden for Jews to go outside after 9 pm because of curfew. One man went out of his flat as he wanted to use the toilette, when a soldier standing in the street shot him down. That was my first experience of hearing that people were murdered for nothing. Until then we never realized one might had been shot for something like this.”

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    Schindler´s Factory in Brněnec was a former Löw-Beer thread factory

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    “The Schindler´s factory in Brněnec was a former Löw-Beer thread factory. I am used to knit a lot and also nowadays you can find threads with the ʻmade in Brněnecʼ sign. In the court of that factory we found loads of remaining pieces of yarns and threads. Since we were allowed to use those pieces, we started to knit our clothes out of them. Men made us knitting needles and we began to dress ourselves into: trousers, dresses, underwear, sweaters... Those were all about 30 cm long pieces, which we tied together and knitted. That was such a cheerful side of it all.”

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    Bratislava, 03.03.2015

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My parents and my brother survived – what a great miracle that was

Helena Borská
Helena Borská
zdroj: Pamět národa - Archiv
zdroj: Pamět národa - Archiv
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Helena Borská, née Grünerová, was born in December 1927 in Český Tešín. In 1934 she moved with her family to their relatives in Krakow, where she attended a state elementary school. After the war´s outbreak, since September 1939, the city of Krakow was being occupied. Yet, until the end of that year Jewish children were allowed to go to school, however, the measures were getting much stricter as time passed. When the Krakow ghetto was established, the family was moved into one room. Helena worked with her mother in a dressmaker‘s workshop, her father and brother worked in a locksmith‘s one. In March 1943 they were moved from this ghetto to Płaszow, what was a labor camp on a hill behind Krakow. There they stayed until October 1944. Despite the fact that they were on the Schindler´s list, for three weeks they happened to be transported into Auschwitz. From this concentration camp Schindler recruited them to his newly created factory in Brněnec, where they worked until the end of the war. After the liberation the family of Mrs. Borská returned to Krakow, although, at last they decided to leave Poland and live with their relatives in Bratislava.    

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