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A Memoir of a Survivor
A Memoir and a Story In 1996, after my parents had died, my husband and I took my aunt, who was a holocaust survivor, back to Slovakia in order to visit her and my father’s hometown, Trnava. We also visited the Tatras Mountains where she hid from the Germans while every other Jewish person from Trnava was deported to Auschwitz to be murdered. She was a survivor. During the trip she told us some of her story. She was the reason my father’s family were not able to immigrate to the United States in 19l4 An Immigrant’s Story because at that time she was just two years old. She reminisced about the last time she visited her hometown. “ I was visiting in Trnava, my hometown. I could not show myself too much as people know me that I’m Jewish, and I didn’t wear a star. If you are Jewish you have to register. I never registered. I just didn’t. I remember I was cooking together with my sister, and I got wood for the oven, and as I am standing there in the street I hear a young girl’s voice singing, “she’s Jewish, she’s Jewish” and a boy saying “no.” The two children were arguing. When I heard this, I didn’t wait. I had been married to a German from Sudetenland. We were married in l934 and I had a German name. My husband and I both worked in a chemical factory, an American company that was taken over by the Germans. He works in the office and I work in the office. He was the Secretary to the Director. He spoke a perfect French, a perfect German. English. And in 1938 the Director, as he was Jewish, he left for Argentina and in came a new Director, a German from Austria. A louse. Yet, he spoke better Jewish than any other Jew. He was a big Hitlerian. Arthur Harthauser was his name. Now my husband knows the whole factory in and out, and the new Director didn’t know anything. But his plan was to keep us from each other and he insisted that we get a divorce because he wanted my husband to continue working for him. My husband didn’t want the divorce but the Director was threatening to send him to a factory in Germany and then for sure I would be sent to concentration camp. So, I went separate and he went separate. I lived for a while in a small room and he came at night visiting me at 1:00 o’clock in the morning. Even this the Director knew about. He paid people! The company paid for the divorce. It was a funeral, not a divorce. I got sick in 1941 and by ‘41 they deported people already. I got a very heavy flu and then I got pneumonia. I got pleurisy. So I went in the mountains in the Tatras, I decided I was going to hide there. I never had papers that I was German. I didn’t have any papers. I had my marriage license. I wrote to the League Against Tuberculosis and I got privilege to go to Visne Hagy, a lung sanitarium for the working people. They didn’t know who I am. They didn’t question it. I spoke a beautiful German. They thought I was German. And in ‘42 girls came who were sick from Vienna and from Germany and I was in with them together. And it was very good, very nice, and the Director from this Sanitarium was the brother-in-law of the Slovakian fuehrer! When I recovered, I joined the Resistance and got a job working as a translator in the German headquarters. It was a perfect place to hide”.
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Contributor's Note
I got the information for this intel from a video tape my husband made after we returned from our trip. The story is much longer, very compelling and amazing when it is viewed and you can see this woman tell her story. She survived the Nazis, the communists, the Russians, and finally found a home in the United States where she lived to be 89 years old.
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Flamenco in Miami, FL
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\Thanks for sharing this harrowing story
It's stories like this that make we Americans stop and think of how lucky we are to live in a FREE land.
Thank you for sharing, Julie.
Frederick
The copyright for this content entitled "A Memoir of a Survivor" has been specified by the contributor as:
All Rights Reserved
This content may not be copied, distributed or adapted by anyone under any circumstances.
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