Helena Karafová

“When a train came up that big hill, with the Jews, they opened the doors and they fell out, and the SS men were ready, they shot at everyone, but they didn’t manage to kill them all. My dad pulled one boy out and saved his life, he was twelve years old, and his parents, not that they were sending them to concentration camps or to the gas chambers, there was a lime quarry in Banská Štiavnica, and they threw them into it alive. They were Jews mostly, and then those who were snitched on for fighting against Hitler, they went there, whole families with children. When you speak about it, how it was, it’s almost impossible to imagine that it’s true; but it is true, that’s how it was.”

“My dad took one twelve-year-old boy in his arms and hid him in the shepherd’s place, because many shepherds with sheep were living in the region. The boy stayed there until the end of the war. He would affectionately call me ´sister´ after the war. He later completed his studies. He has been saved this way.”

“The mountains there were higher than those in Karlovy Vary! When a train was passing by, and you know what kind of trains were in use at that time, it went very slowly just as some crawling bug, and it was full of Jews. And my father or other partisans would go there and tear out the rails so that they would be able to throw the kids out to the forest. And those children got saved, they did not shoot them. Dad said: ´I don’t know how it’s possible, but I haven’t been hit by a single bullet.´ There were so many of these Jewish children!”

“It’s a big rock, and it has something like cellars dug inside it, and it’s quite pleasantly warm in the rock. The door was masked by trees say, and no one knew something was there; unless they’d been there, they couldn’t find it. It was masked like the forest, the entrance was. There were various things inside, duvets, to keep warm, we even survived a bit of winter there. It was terrible, you can’t imagine what a person can survive.”

“There were more of us living in those holes in the mountains, it was our home. We were going out when it was possible, depending on the movement of the front. I even got home to see my mom. I was lucky that nobody turned me in. When SS men were walking through the village and investigating, nobody knew anything.”