Jossi Steiner

“Mother knocked at the door and neighbour says: “Go away, I need nothing.” She thought my mother was a farmwife selling eggs and butter in the town, in Zlaté Moravce. Mother understood, so she took her bonnet off. Neighbour opened the door again and wanted to send her away when suddenly she recognized my mother, Irenka Steinerová. She says: “Oh jeepers, they told us you wouldn’t come back home!” “I am here,” mother says, “my children starve and three years ago I gave you my jewels, so now, please, give them back to me.” The neighbour says: “Yes sure, but they are set in the wall and my husband comes back home in the afternoon.” What I forgot to say is that on the way from station, in Telepa, it is a name of a quarter in Zlaté Moravce, there were three people hanged. At present there is a commemorative plaque. I went there and saw it. Gestapo hanged them. I think one of them was a Jew.”

“And father says: “Look here, you are building that room here and there is a basement, so what would happen if we made a kind of hole between these two walls where we, nine people, could hide?” That space was about five meters long and one and a half or two meters wide. Soon it was summer 1944 after the Slovak National Uprising that took thirty to sixty days. That frightful era came, when not Slovaks, but Germans together with the most loyal Slovaks, who were reliable for them – Hlinka Guard and its emergency troops (POHG) - were searching for Jews and, naturally, we were scared.”

“It was a nice day, when Germans came, they belonged to a unit with mortar and they ordered Anča to get out of the room, so between us and Germans there were just three or four centimetres. Nothing else. Moreover, we couldn’t get anything; they stamped all the time and of course, the housewife couldn’t go to the shed with food because cows don’t eat fruit compote yet. They even don’t eat potatoes, not so far as I know. There were also swine and a kind of wooden tank for swine’s fodder. And there she put one black sock with some potatoes. And she gave us a warning: Stay in silence, Germans are here. However, we saw them, they didn’t have to tell us because firstly we heard them and then we had two gaps in the wall, naturally, masked ones, because we needed air to breathe. And through that gap, I saw the soldier’s boots. He stood next to the mortar. I remember it till today. Fortunately, it didn’t take a long time; Germans stayed in Mr. Mozolák’s house just for two weeks. Then we could be a bit calmer. Of course, the calmness back then was quite different from how we understand it today. At that time, Hlinka Guard and German troops searched for Jews and they found them also in our neighbourhood. So we were afraid.”

“But let’s go back to Zlaté Moravce when my father got that message. He immediately organized that we would go for a walk. My brother was in a pram and we used that pram in two ways. Firstly we put there the smallest things we had to take with us, you know, the most necessary things and we left the house. I was almost six years old, so I went on foot, my mother, father, and Robi Mojše in the pram. In that pram, there were some things under it, we tried to be inconspicuous, so we walked around in Zlaté Moravce just like an ordinary family and near the cemetery, opposite the grammar school, there was a cab waiting for us. When we crossed the border, I was told that then I had to be dumb. And the reason was that I spoke only Slovak and it was suspicious because in a short period of time we were wanted through radio. We were searched by Slovak police also in Hungary.”

“Although we probably wanted to go to Romania, we found ourselves surrounded in a ghetto, but in this kind of ghetto you could even get a telegram. And my father sent the telegram: “In no case write your name on the paper; don’t write your name on the list as usual!” Near this house, there were two toilets, rural ones. As we know, these latrines stand on two boards and there is a cesspit under them. With my brother, we were told that we had to get to the latrine and hide there. But not inside the toilet, just under the seat, on those two boards holding the construction. So we went under the seat and sat there, one here and another one there and we were silent until the list was complete. And this way we successfully avoided being recorded.”

“The room above our concealment helped us a lot because Anča gave us a signal, and then we knew that we couldn’t cough or sneeze, that there had to be absolute silence because if somebody coughed in the basement, it’d be obvious that spuds didn´t do that. Imagine that I was just eight-year-old boy. Eight years old. We were five boys there and two buckets. One was intended to answer the call of nature and the second one was prepared for water if we had some. We slept on the straw. There was a plank where fathers slept and we all with mums, my aunt and my mother too, laid under that plank. This way we lived there. When we heard three bangs it meant danger, one bang meant that alarm was cancelled, or that the soldiers went away. In this way we had to live for nine months. We didn’t see the sunlight, so we all became yellow.”