Eva Boros - February 11, 1983
Bratislava II
they all had to use one...
Mm-hm.
toilet. It was terrible shall I say. And we were six of us, we lived in two rooms. And uh, not only this, but not only two rooms, but there were sometimes some people that came across the border, Polish Jews that my father picked up in the, in the shul, that he brought home for a night or for two, just to you know, not to let them stay outside and they fed and whatever. It was how it was. And it was nothing special. I don't think that we were outstanding. There are many of these religious Jews thought that this is a must. It's--you do it because you are a Jew. And uh, so we arrived home and my sister still was there and it was terrible. And I can tell you that I saw my mother getting gray hair in six weeks. And, I mean, she had the more or less the same color like I do now, which is not the regular, it's already graying, but she got gray in six weeks. It was from the sorrow and the pain and the scariness that her child is in Hungary. So finally, my sister escaped, escaped the... Not only Hungary, she escaped her own relatives. So anyway, she arrived one day home the same was as we did and thank God it was okay. And then, that was in March, a...approximately April she arrived home. Things were starting to be deplorable in Czechoslovakia. They started to send to concen...to Germany and uh, and uh, Austrian concentration camps all those Jews that were in the labor camps. In Czechoslovakia sometimes they picked up uh, Jews and they just killed them on the spot. And uh, it was unbelievable. It was just awful. And uh, I'm not speaking anymore because that's obvious that there was absolutely no possibility of shopping. We were, we had uh, only certain hours of the day that one can go out, and... It was just terrible. I uh, myself, I imagine because being a kid I didn't understand really the real danger and I honestly tell you I did not have ever any fear at all. And it might have been some mistake of the nature because I just never was afraid of anything. And uh, I went out and I did shop and I did—I, for all of us, there was no bread to have, only on rations and it was not enough. So I went uh, you know, to all kinds of little bakeries and I said, "Well, I'm so hungry I would like to have just a little slice of bread." And then I collected three or four big slices of bread and then it was ???. Anyway, it doesn't--it's not making myself good. Only the fact that things were really bad at this point. So in September '44 uh, they knew that this is it. That not much will be left anymore. The Hungarian Jews were completely gone by this time. They deported them all. I have not uh, the exact uh, dates, but I know they were all gone. They were deported, I think, in four months, all of them, including that family that my sister was there. Uh, so my fa...my parents decided to hide each one of us separately. They did have all kinds of friends, non-Jewish friends that they... Also my father uh, hid his--most of his money, or at least a big chunk of money, which was a, a nice sum, with a uh, uh, with a, a, gentleman that took over my uncle's shop. And he took it, oh I'm saying it in this way because they were more or less friends and they did it out of uh, goodness in order to be able to return it as is. In this way, they more or less had some uh, possibility to take care of it. Now uh, since my father did trust and he left money there, the guy it was an older gentleman, was some professor of something, I don't know what. And he had a son who was in the Nazi Party of Czechoslovakia. Now uh, that was in September, beginning of September. I went, I was sent away to a friend of mine, to a family outside of Bratislava in some village. And we lived there uh, at a peasants woman's house who, she was a widow and she had a son. We could never eat anymore kosher, of course. Uh...
This was September?
September, beginning of September. I don't know exactly the dates. I never bothered to look it up.
Sure.
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