Pressburg Yeshiva (Austria-Hungary)

Transcription

It was a beautiful country, it was a big democracy, especially under President Masaryk, it's just a shame that it had to fall to Hitler. Bratislava was on the Danube on 3 borders - Hungary, Austria and Czechoslovakia. Practically everybody spoke German, Hungarian and Slovak or Czech. On the eve of WWII, the Jewish community in Bratislava, Slovakia was a center of religious, cultural and Zionist activity. 15,000 Jews lived in the city, approximately 12 percent of the total population. Most of Bratislava's Jews were Orthodox, but the community also included Jews from many different streams of Judaism. For the most part, relations between the Jews and their neighbors were good, but occasionally they did encounter anti-Semitism. We were pretty Orthodox. My father wasn't, but my mother was pretty Orthodox. We went to synagogue frequently just like most of the people. In the afternoon, after the regular school, we went to Cheder and there we had rabbis who taught us Jewish education. When we finished 5th grade, there was a choice - to go to high school, call it "high school", or you could go to Yesod HaTorah, that means the base of the Yeshiva. First the preparation for Yeshiva, there were 6 grades in this one. So 6 years you could go there. I remember tennis courts near the university building and I remember playing with my school friends and teachers, even. I remember particularly one teacher I was very keen on, his name was Weiner, I think, and we played tennis and then swimming: I belonged to the Bar Kokhba and I swam in the local swimming pool, an indoor pool, and then I used to go to the Lido in the summer and I used to participate in races. Independent Slovakia, a state under the patronage of Nazi Germany, was established in March 1939, 6 months before the outbreak of WWII, and with its establishment the situation of the country's Jews deteriorated. Bratislava became the seat of the government institutions and the Jews there were the first Slovak Jews to suffer humiliation and persecution. They were subjected to economic sanctions and were conscripted for forced labor. In January 1940, Jews and gypsies were forbidden by law to be drafted into the Slovak army. Instead, they were meant to report for physical labor in special units. Life started to change very drastically. First of all, when the Anschluss came in Austria, the border, the Bratislava, the Danube goes through Bratislava and the other side of the Danube was all the way occupied by the Germans. When the Anschluss came for Austria. So, the first thing is, you saw big signs there, "Jews, go to Palestine." In '39 I had to go to the army, I was drafted and every Jewish boy was drafted. But we didn't go anymore with weapons, they gave us shovels instead of weapons. We had to be as a unit Šiesty prápor , that means 6th Brigade, we had to be all together and do slave work. The deportation of the Jews of Slovakia to Lublin and to the Auschwitz death camp, Poland, began in the spring of 1942. The Working Group, a group of community activists who attempted to stop the deportations by bribing Slovak and German government officials, commenced activity at the height of the deportations. After some 58,000 Jews had been deported, the deportations stopped, in some measure due to the actions of the Working Group. And then they started to send Jews with the transports. First they started with us, we went to the army and there we were in working camps, and then they started even the young girls to send to Germany. And then after that, slowly they started to deport people. The people were very scared, very, very scared. In 1942 they started to take the single people, single girls, single boys, we didn't know where to. Everybody over 16. And then later the families left. And especially in Bratislava either they shipped them out to a village some place, or they also erected some work camps in 2 or 3 places. Some of my relatives were there before going to Auschwitz. Armed cells of the Jewish resistance existed in the 3 labor camps for Jews in Slovakia - Novaky, Sered and Vyhne. These were set up mainly as resistance units in the eventuality of further deportations from Slovakia. In August 1944, the Slovak National Uprising broke out and these armed cells, as well as other Jews, joined the insurrection. The uprising was suppressed by the Germans and the deportations from Slovakia were renewed. Some 12 thousand Jews were deported to Auschwitz, Theresienstadt and camps in Germany. A week before that an uprising is prepared so we started with two friends of mine to move and prepare ourselves to go there. We went by train 2 days earlier, no control after we came to... I don't remember what city, where we will stop and the first time the partisans stopped the train, looked through them, who happened to maybe a Fascist or whatever they talk about and we went further to Banská Bystrica Together, as soon as we came there, we were immediately introduced to the battalion of the... under the name... Vysokoškolská jednota that is the battalion of the university students. I came in there too. I never went to university but I came, all the rest did university, whatever. Immediately we came in and 2 days later we were involved in fighting. That was exactly the night when the Slovaks were left out but the Germans took over and that's when they came to get us. And what do you remember of that night? We were woken up around 3 o'clock in the morning with lots of noise and banging and we were told to pack and come and immediately, no hiding and no nothing, there were 4 or 5 big, tall guys, one in each room, watching us and that was the opportunity, the occasion when that guy told us, told my father how happy he is that he finally could catch him. Then they took us to some kind of a building, I don't remember which one, I remember the neighborhood, where we got processed or something before they took us to the railroad station. The Jews of Slovakia were deported to camps in Poland and Germany in 2 waves: In 1942 and in the last months of the war, between October 1944 and March 1945. Out of the 70,000 Jews deported, some 4000 survived. In addition, approximately 3000 Jews were murdered in Slovakia in the course of the suppression of the Slovak National Uprising. Of the 90,000 Slovak Jews, only some 20,000 survived - some in hiding and in the ranks of the partisans.