Miriam Rezek

“We live in Israel, but things aren’t easy even now. The political situation is difficult. I don’t know how things will be. It is very hard for people here; they work hard when the children study; it’s very expensive when you want to give them something a bit better. But as Mum said: ‘This is the only place we can live. It’s our country, the one that was given to us.’”

“So Mum had three children, eight grandchildren, twenty great-grandchildren. She always said she had won. She has a family, she has children, and the family lives on. Our family is here.”

“During the war, in 1944, my parents fled into the mountains in Orava. Mum was three months expecting. They looked for a place to hide, and Mum remembered one family in the place where they used to live. Mum and Dad were from Velká Bytča. So she remembered that someone lived there, and they went to them. The man told them they could stay, but so the Germans didn’t find out they were hiding there, Dad had to dig up a pit underneath the house. They hid there. They were there for six months. Mum was pregnant and it was very, very hard. It was in the winter - they’d come there in October. Two or three weeks before the war ended, the family that hid them there - Adamik there name was - begged my parents to leave.”

“My brother weighed 900 grams, less than a kilo. There were still nuns in the hospital, and one of them told Mum he probably wouldn’t live, but that they’d do everything they could to save him. So one nun took Mum and said: ‘Come with me to pray.’ Mum said: ‘I’m a Jew, I can’t go with you.’ – ‘God is everywhere, come with me.’ So she prayed. She came back to the hospital and the doctor told her: ‘He’ll live. He will.’ And so it was.”