Juraj Steiner

* 1936

  • "In Budapest, one could stay at one address for only 6 weeks. After 6 weeks, we always had to change apartments. This happened three times. When we got to the street, it was one of the last apartments where we only had one room. It was already quite unpleasant there. Well, there, I guess on the third floor, lived a neighbor who began to suspect us of being Jews. He even asked me, I was still a small child – I was not even 6 years old, that 'you zidok vagytok?' He somehow deduced it. Well, I didn't say anything, I just ran away from him and told my mom. She knew that something had to be done, so I don't know how, whether it was through an advertisement or something, she took me to a family nearby, where they accepted me. She stayed in the original apartment, and I got into the Beck family."

  • "It was agreed with a man who was supposed to take us across the border. We met at the agreed place, I remember there were hills. He was waiting for us there and then we walked up the hill. When we were up, he told us to stay there, that he was going to look at the terrain, whether it was suitable, whether there was a border guard somewhere. We waited for him there for a long time until we got scared that he had tricked us and left. So we set off on foot, me, mother, old mother, roughly in the direction we thought the border was. Fortunately, he appeared before long and led us to the train station. That railway station was not located directly in the village, but was on its outskirts. And there we waited. It was already dark because we set out at night and got there in the dark. We waited until the train arrived at the station, which we boarded, and with it we got to Nové Zámky. From there we then went to the grandmother's daughter's apartment, it was still dark, so no one saw us. We stayed in that apartment for one day, and then in the evening we left for Budapest with my mother."

  • "It went on like this until late autumn, when nothing happened – I lived in that apartment in Budapest, my mother came to visit me until one day she didn't come to visit me, as she used to do. I was a little boy and so I cried after her 'where is mom?' and they comforted me. Finally, after a few days, we found out that she was caught - she had papers with the name Lányi, even when I lived with her, I had that name too. Well, she used to eat at a buffet at the intersection of Andrássy street, where she was raided. The door was closed, she told us afterwards, and they legitimized it. The papers she had were insufficient – they were enough for us when they accommodated us, but they were no longer enough to prove identity, so they packed her up and took her away."

  • Celé nahrávky
  • 1

    Komárno, 22.03.2022

    (audio)
    délka: 02:07:10
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of the 20th century
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

We took it to mean that this is the time and we have to deal with it

Photo taken during the eyd recording of the interview
Photo taken during the eyd recording of the interview
zdroj: Photo by Post Bellum SK

Juraj Steiner was born on May 26, 1936 in the district town, Zlaté Moravce, located in the Dolná Nitra region, into a Jewish family. He spent his early childhood surrounded by his parents and grandmother, with whom they ran a book, paper, glass and porcelain store. After the declaration of the Slovak state in 1939, he and his family were persecuted because of their Jewish origin. As a result of the adoption of a series of anti-Jewish laws in 1942, Juraj‘s family lost their livelihood – the family general store, and with it their home. Subsequently, Juraj‘s father was interned in a labor camp in Nováky, from where he was deported to a concentration camp in Lublin, where he died of typhus. In an attempt to avoid transportation, Juraj and his mother and grandmother fled from Zlaté Moravce to Hungary. Witness and his mother finally survived the first and second wave of deportation of Slovak Jews in Budapest, where they adopted a new identity. After the arrival of the Arrow Cross party, which established terror in the country, Juraj‘s mother was taken to the women‘s concentration camp in Ravensbrück. Juraj thus survived the last months of the war in substitute custody behind the walls of the Budapest ghetto. After the liberation, the family returned to Zlaté Moravce, where they began to devote themselves to the restoration of the family business. It disappeared after the start of the nationalization of private enterprises. In the years 1952 – 1956, Juraj completed his studies at the Secondary Industrial School in Komárno, where he learned a trade. After completing his mandatory military service at the air force unit in Hradec Králové, he started working at the Komárno Slovak Shipyard plant, where he gradually worked his way up to head of department. He later supplemented his professional education with distance studies at the Faculty of Engineering of STU in Bratislava. He currently lives in retirement in Komárno.