“However, I only realized it wasn’t good, when we travelled home by train and they let us wait at the borders for four hours. That’s when I saw my mom crying. I didn’t know why, but then I found out, when we came home and saw all of the tanks and everything. It was my very first bad experience. I was ten. And then, later there was a thing that I wasn’t accepted to the university despite the fact that I was a very good student. I studied easily thanks to my great memory, so I didn’t have any problems with that. Moreover, I won a an English School Olympiad as I chose quite difficult topic. In Helsinki, on August 1, 1975 there was founded the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) and already in 1976, I chose to deal with this topic in English. Nevertheless, neither the fact that I won the Olympiad, nor my activities at school and expert committee of the Socialist Union of Youth helped me to get to university.”
“They had to march to Kremnička. My grandfather, grandmother, some of their children, and some of their daughters-in-law with children were shot down there. However, my grandpa was quite old back then, I don’t know his age, but he was definitely an older man, who wasn’t capable of such a journey. The march was during the night and since he couldn’t walk, a guardsman hit him with the gun and grandpa fell down. He fell to the woods, away from the road and he broke his leg. Fortunately, no one noticed it in the dark. On the next day, the Kremnička citizens found him, loaded him on a wagon and took him to hospital in Banská Bystrica.”
“I visited the Yad Vashem Memorial and I realized it was good I wasn’t prepared for that, otherwise I couldn’t have made it. I wouldn’t have had the courage to go. In 2004 I took there my daughter and my niece and after we came out of the museum, mainly from the Children’s Memorial, my two girls kept crying for two more hours.”
Alexandra Tóthová-Bachnárová belongs to the so-called second generation of the Holocaust. She was born in April 1958 into the family of journalists. She studied at grammar school on Hubeného street in Bratislava. She worked in different professions. She was employed in Bratislava’s branch of the Czechoslovak Bus Transportation, in Slovenská kniha, and also in media sphere. She is divorced and has one daughter. Since November 1989 she focuses on popularization of life stories of the Holocaust survivors, including the life story of her father Alexander Bachnár.
Hrdinové 20. století odcházejí. Nesmíme zapomenout. Dokumentujeme a vyprávíme jejich příběhy. Záleží vám na odkazu minulých generací, na občanských postojích, demokracii a vzdělávání? Pomozte nám!
