“That was during the uprising, when there was the uprising in Banská Bystrica. Then they opened the ghetto and said that we could all go wherever we wanted to - home or to the partisans. Mum said we couldn’t go home because the Germans were still strong and they’d be back. She was right. So we went to Banská Bystrica, where the uprising was.”
“It was almost the end of the war, we had no food, and one man took his daughter and went to the village to beg for something to eat. There were Germans in the village - they caught him, tortured him, and he told them that there were more Jews in the cottage where we were hiding. We were sitting in the cottage when they suddenly started firing at the windows. There was one young pregnant woman there, she gave birth to her child and they killed them. I remember everyone screaming. One screamed: ‘Mummy, I’m afraid to die!’ They shot at the windows, then they stopped firing and told us to come out. They stood us in a line. I remember what I thought - I thought that war was one soldier against another, that children weren’t supposed to be in a war. So we went outside, some of us were wounded, we stood side by side, and Mum asked my father what would happen next. ‘What’ll happen? Can’t you see what they’re doing? They’ll kill us.’ Mum said: ‘I don’t believe they’ll kill us.’ She was so optimistic, it was unusual. She was right. They took us down into the village. I think that the war was almost over; we think that the German commander wanted us to say that he had behaved well - because the Russians were getting near - I don’t know. Then the Russians came and saved us.”
“But there was a pogrom in Topoľčany. The Slovaks - I mean the ones to whom the Jews had given their things for safekeeping - said: ‘More of you came than had left, more of you returned than had left.’ So they sent the police, and the cops were against the Jews. Then they brought the partisans in, and they put an end to it.”
Aharon Eduard Vlček was born on 30 November 1939 into a Jewish family in Topoľčany, Slovakia. His father was a plumber, his mother was a washerwoman; the couple had three children. In 1942 the family was deported to a labour camp in Nováky, where they were kept until the end of August 1944. The camp was dissolved because of the Slovak National Uprising, and the family decided to go to Banská Bystrica. They and several other Jews then hid in a mountain lodge in the forests. At the end of the war, the group was betrayed and discovered - several people were shot by the Nazis, the witness and his family were taken captive and were later liberated by the Red Army. After their release they returned to Topoľčany; following a pogrom on Jews in September 1945 they left the city and moved to Liberec. There they awaited their emigration to Israel - the whole family moved there in 1949. Eduard Vlček took on the name of Aharon. After school he attended a yeshiva - a religious school - and he later taught history and religion at a school in Tifrah, near Beer Sheva in southern Israel. Aharon Eduard Vlček took part in the Six-Day War in 1967. He and his wife brought up ten children and have thirty-nine grandchildren.
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