My Seven Lives: Jana Juráňová in Conversation with Agneša Kalinová

By Jana Juráňová and Agneša Kalinová

My Seven Lives is the English translation of the best-selling memoir of Slovak journalist Agneša Kalinová (1924–2014): Holocaust survivor, film critic, translator, and political prisoner. An oral history written with her colleague Jana Juráňová, My Seven Lives provides a window into Jewish history, the Holocaust, and the cultural evolution of Central and Eastern Europe. The conversational approach gives the book a relatable immediacy that vividly conveys the tone and temperament of Agneša, bringing out her lively personality and extraordinary ability to stay positive in the face of adversity.

Each chapter reflects a distinct period of Agneša’s long and tumultuous life. Her idyllic childhood gives way to the rise of Nazism and restrictions of the anti-Jewish legislation, which led to deportations and her escape to Hungary, where she found refuge in a Budapest convent. Surviving the Holocaust, she returned to Slovakia and married writer Ján Ladislav Kalina. They embraced communism, and Agneša began her career as a journalist and film critic and became involved in the Prague Spring, ending with the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Agneša and her husband lost their jobs and were imprisoned, which led to their decision to immigrate to West Germany. She found a new career as a political commentator for Radio Free Europe, and after decades of political oppression, Agneša lived to see the euphoric days of the Velvet Revolution and its freeing aftermath.

My Seven Lives shows the impact of an often brutal twentieth century on the life of one remarkable individual. It’s a story of survival, perseverance, and ultimately triumph.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Purdue University Press
• Release date: Oct 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9781612497211

Jana Juráňová

Jana Juráňová cofounded the feminist educational and publication project ASPEKT, where she remains a coordinator and editor. She has translated over twenty books from English, including Three Guineas by Virginia Woolf, Gender Trouble by Judith Butler, and Trauma and Recovery by Judith Herman. She is a playwright and author of children’s books and literary fiction. Her novel Naničhodnica (The Wretch) was published in 2020. She has been nominated three times for Slovakia’s most prestigious literary award, Anasoft Litera. For My Seven Lives both authors were awarded the Egon Erwin Kisch Prize in Prague. In 2018 Juráňová received a state prize for her literary activities and the promotion of human rights and democracy from the president of the Slovak Republic.

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Preface

My Twentieth Century With Agneša Kalinová

I first met Agneša Kalinová more or less by chance at the Karlovy Vary festival, in the early 1990s. The friend who introduced us had sung her praises: You really must meet her, she has this beautiful, sunny face. Although Agneša knew nothing about me, she was warm and very kind to me. And so, when I found myself in Munich in 1992 taking up a new position at the Czechoslovak service of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, I already had a friend there. Nearly two decades have passed since, and we have kept in touch.

Sometime in 2010 the writer and theater maker Anka Grusková mentioned casually over a cup of coffee that it would be a great idea for someone to conduct a book-length interview with Agneša. Neither of us had the capacity to take it on at the time and the idea fell off my radar, but I revived it some time later as I became increasingly aware that there were major gaps and flaws in my own knowledge of the history of my part of the world. The older I am, the more I feel the need to fill these gaps. Thus the idea of conducting this interview coincided with my need to revise my knowledge of the past century, supposedly so short but all the more harrowing.

Agneša was born at the time of the first Czechoslovak Republic, to parents still bearing traces of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy in their hearts. She grew up between two world wars, in a period that included both the emergence of cultural and political avant-gardes as well as of fascism. World War II and the Holocaust left their cruel mark on her family’s fate. In the late 1940s she was among those for whom the new era opened new opportunities. But soon, by the early 1950s, the totalitarian regime showed its true colors, afflicting many around her. As a staff writer for Kultúrny život (Cultural Life), one of the key opinion-forming periodicals of the period, Agneša was involved in the endeavor to liberalize the Czechoslovak variety of totalitarianism. The all-too-brief period of the Prague Spring was followed by a harsh period of normalization, which brought persecution upon many of her friends and her loved ones as well as herself, culminating in her imprisonment. By the late 1970s life in Czechoslovakia had become untenable, compelling her and her family to emigrate to Munich, where she went on to work for Radio Free Europe and continued to live after her retirement, visiting Slovakia often and with much pleasure.

While planning the interview I came to realize that it would be a real shame not to make use of her phenomenal memory, openness, and gift for storytelling. My friends and colleagues at the publishing house ASPEKT loved the idea as well. We just had to hope that Agneša would agree to our proposal. After thinking about it for a while, she sent me all sorts of material, press clippings, and articles. Preparing for a conversation covering several historical periods was a daunting, but also fascinating, task. I reread a thesis on Agneša by a student of journalism, all four volumes of the autobiography of her husband, Ladislav Ján Kalina, published in the 1990s by Marenčin PT, and the memoirs of many others who had lived through those years, as well listening to the recording of a video interview with Agneša conducted by the Milan Šimečka Foundation as part of their oral history project on Holocaust survivors. Having done my homework, I set out for Munich.

In the summer of 2011, I twice spent several days at Agneša’s Munich home, recording forty-four hours of conversation. While transcribing the tapes, I searched for the best way of capturing my interviewee’s unique personality, and I found feminist research on the theory and practice of oral history extremely helpful. Our lives play out in the public as well as the private space, which are inseparable, and the more complex their intermingling, the more seamless is the picture that emerges. This also proved to be the case with My Seven Lives.

The final shape of this book is the result of some nine months of focused and intensive work by myself and Agneša, and my colleagues at ASPEKT.

The resulting lesson in twentieth-century history ended up being a gripping and stirring experience for me and will also be, I hope, for those who pick up this book.

Jana Juráňová, 2012

1

Childhood and Adolescence

1924–1942

You were born ten years after the outbreak of the Great War.

Believe it or not, I’ve never thought of it in that way! To me the Great War was something ancient, even if not antediluvian. I saw no direct link between it and my own life, even though all the grown-ups around me had lived through the war and kept telling stories about it. Austria-Hungary, the old monarchy, seemed like some distant memory, a totally different world. It wasn’t until much later that I realized what a deep mark it had left on the people around me and my own childhood. In fact, there’s something that’s been a lifelong motif for me, something Central European: discontinuity. There’s a sudden upheaval, brought on by outside circumstances, unwarranted interference by external forces, which wipes out everything, or at least much of what we have taken for granted, and you have to start again from scratch. And each time it’s like the beginning of a new era.

You grew up in Prešov but you were actually born in Košice, is that right?

From my first days at high school, or gymnázium as it was called, I felt a bit awkward about the fact that I was born in Košice. Or rather, that Košice had been recorded as my birthplace only because my mother went there to give birth because at the time there wasn’t yet a maternity clinic in Prešov. So out of embarrassment I resorted to a half-truth and pointed out that my parents began their married life in Košice, as it was my father’s hometown. But the truth is that they moved to Prešov at least two years before I was born, when he was appointed director of the Prešov branch of the Slovenská všeobecná úverová banka (the Slovak General Credit Bank). In every other respect, I identified completely with Prešov and was a local patriot, just like many of our friends.

How did local patriotism in Prešov manifest itself?

The locals, especially the older generation who had been educated in the Hungarian school system, liked to boast of the ancient history of the city they called Athens on the Torysa River. They were particularly proud of the Lutheran college that was founded sometime in the seventeenth century as a counterweight to the Jesuit university in Trnava. Jan Amos Comenius had taught there. And a plaque reminded students that the graduates of the college included a student from Orava, Pavol Országh Hviezdoslav, who went on to become Slovakia’s national poet.

Although after the war Prešov no longer had a university, it felt very much like a student town. For a total population of perhaps 24,000 it had three gymnáziums, including a Ruthenian one, and two teacher training colleges, one of them Ruthenian. There was also a technical college, several vocational training schools, a domestic college for girls, known as the knedlikáreň (the dumpling factory), one public and one Catholic middle school for girls, as well as several primary schools—public, church-run, and two Jewish. Unlike in Košice, there was no nursery school.

The old Prešovians took pride in the well-preserved town houses on the main square and the High Street, built in the Upper Hungarian Renaissance style, which lingered on into the seventeenth century. The houses had ornate facades; the most beautiful one, Rákoczi’s house, is a reminder of the city’s involvement in numerous anti-Habsburg rebellions and uprisings. Although when I was growing up the younger generation was much keener on the charming little park at the center of the oblong main square, with its benches, ornamental shrubs, avenue of roses, and a huge fountain with goldfish and a Neptune’s well in the middle. It was a gift that Mr. Holländer, the first Jew allowed to settle there and an affluent man, made to the city in the late eighteenth century. In the evenings, one side of the High Street, the one facing the imposing St. Michael’s Church with its enormous neo-Gothic spire, was transformed into the student promenade or, as we called it, the korzo. I should mention that I use the term High Street so that I don’t have to keep saying that, at different points in time, it was known as Masaryk, Hlinka, or Stalin Street, and so on.

Obviously, Prešov was a distinctive educational and cultural center. How much of it do you actually remember?

My own memory of Prešov as a city of culture has been strongly contaminated by what I learned about Prešov later, through the memoirs of my husband, Ladislav (Laco) Ján Kalina, especially the first part, Look Back With a Smile, which focuses almost exclusively on prewar Prešov. When he wrote it in the 1970s, this was his way of protesting against Slovakia’s smaller towns being drained of culture and creativity. I think that between the two wars, at the time of the first Czechoslovak republic, this relatively small city had a livelier cultural life than many Slovak towns of comparable size. This involved imported culture, that is, performances by visiting orchestras, soloists, theater companies, as well as major literary figures from Prague, Germany, and even the United States, as well as the homegrown cultural activities. Laco wrote about local orchestras, about Czech, Slovak, and Hungarian amateur theater productions, and, of course, student theater, including the first productions of plays by Voskovec and Werich that he himself staged at the City Theater, with himself in the role of Voskovec.

How much of this do you personally remember?

For me a key part of Prešov’s culture was its bookstores, although these memories aren’t from my earliest childhood. Whenever the more culturally oriented bookstores—the town had two or three of these—didn’t have a particular book in stock, they were happy to order it for their customers from Vienna, Berlin, or Budapest. Then, of course, there were the movies, something I’ve always loved. There were two movie theaters in Prešov: the older one, Olympia, used to screen silent movies, and Scala, the modern one, housed in a new building. I have no idea what got them to name a movie theater after the Milan opera—someone must have thought it had a posh ring to it. Sometimes I would be taken by my parents, but later I would manage to sneak in somehow, even to films with a PG or R rating—my friends and I raised this to the level of a sport.

Prešov also had several sports clubs—the Czech Sokol¹ and the Slovak Orol.² Sokol had a skating rink, but we preferred skating at the city rink, which was downtown. I made a few half-hearted attempts to join the Sokol, but it didn’t come to much.

What was the dominant language spoken in Prešov at that time?

In late nineteenth-century Prešov, the Hungarian authorities put enormous pressure on all the other ethnic groups living there, suppressed their languages, and forced them to adopt the Hungarian language. This included the German minority, which was still quite large at that time. The process of magyarization was completed by the end of the nineteenth century. Later, after the creation of Czechoslovakia, a period of Slovak renationalization followed. By the mid-1920s Slovak was the dominant language in Prešov, although it was a variety strongly influenced by my beloved Šariš dialect. After the departure of the Austro-Hungarian administration, their posts were filled by Czechs, and gradually more and more Slovak officials, teachers, and professors appeared. From the late eighteenth century the city also had a Jewish population, split into two groups that were sometimes at odds with each other. On the one hand there were the more religious Jews, mainly craftspeople and traders, and on the other, the Reform, or Neolog, Jews. The latter tried to adapt to the modern era in terms of education and lifestyle, in order to blend in with the rest of the population, that is, to assimilate. This colorful mix of people coexisted in the city in peace and, at least, apparent harmony. The result was a very lively and varied cultural milieu whose individual elements competed with and influenced one another.

Which community did your family belong to?

Between the wars the community that my parents belonged to played a leading role in the life of Prešov. These people—I’m talking about my parents’ generation—were mostly strongly assimilated Jews: lawyers, doctors, the professional classes. Most of them belonged to the Neolog Jewish community (the term Reform Jews is more common nowadays³). They refused to be defined solely by their religious affiliation, and with a few exceptions, did not regard Jewishness as a nationality (what we would now call an ethnicity). In the city of Prešov and in eastern Slovakia in general, the Slovak national self-awareness movement wasn’t strong enough to attract them in their younger years. They graduated from Hungarian high schools and universities, felt fully accepted by this milieu, and stayed loyal to this cultural orientation for sentimental reasons, too. They valued and were grateful for the first Czechoslovak republic’s fundamentally democratic and tolerant nature, partly because it was in contrast to the virulent anti-Semitism of Hungary under Admiral Horthy.

How did the two Jewish communities get along in those days?

Prešov had a large Orthodox community as well as a very small Hasidic one. When the Hasidim danced in the courtyard of the great Orthodox Synagogue during the fall holidays, we used to go and watch them and, I must confess, poke fun at them. We didn’t mix with the Hasidim, they were a closed group who kept to themselves. But the Orthodox and Neolog communities were quite intermingled in those days. For instance, my mother’s parents were Orthodox. It was partly a generational issue whether someone belonged to one group or the other. Orthodox Jews were stricter about observing religious practices, the food in Orthodox families was kosher—according to the rules.

There were two synagogues in Prešov: the Great Synagogue, which has recently been beautifully restored, served the Orthodox community. Nowadays it houses the collection of Judaica that used to belong to the Jewish museum before the war. The Neolog synagogue also survived the war, only to be turned into a warehouse. I’m not sure if it hasn’t been knocked down since.

By all accounts, it seems Prešov was quite a tolerant city.

Yes, the circles my family moved in as well as the school environment, especially the gymnázium, were tolerant. It was only later on that I encountered something different. I had been vaguely aware of Hlinka’s Slovak National Party and the fact that anti-Semitism had taken root not only in Hitler’s Germany, but also in Czechoslovakia. But throughout the first Republic I had personally never come across this kind of sentiment, no one had ever called me a dirty Jew, children never shouted abuse at me. That is why I took it much more to heart a few years later: it caught me totally unawares. That was the other side of my idyllic childhood.

Hearing accounts like this makes me wonder if the idea of widespread tolerance doesn’t actually idealize the past. Wasn’t it rather the case that the various groups simply lived side by side but didn’t interact much?

Yes, it’s fair to say that individual ethnic and religious groups lived side by side and the good thing was that they didn’t get in each other’s way. But Prešov was a small city, folks from various walks of life had known each other for years, and even those who didn’t visit each other would have gone to the same schools, would bump into each other in the street, at work, at the market, and would exchange greetings and stop for a chat. The atmosphere was very relaxed, casual. People would meet at social events such as dances and May balls. They were usually organized by profession, but they weren’t completely closed. My parents and families of other middle-class Jewish professionals used to go to the Hungarian casino to socialize, play cards, mingling there with their Hungarian counterparts.

The generation between mine and that of my parents, who started going to Slovak schools sometime in the 1920s, had a very different lifestyle. For them the traditional social, and especially ethnic and religious, barriers disappeared almost completely for a while. Young people would be brought together quite spontaneously by their interests. Family bonds didn’t cease to exist, but lines of communication were much more open. I myself didn’t get a chance to enjoy this as an adolescent—by the time I was fifteen, this freedom had gone. I felt these barriers and limitations much more acutely than my parents had done in their youth. And I could only envy those who were about ten years older than me, such as my future husband Laco and his Jewish, Slovak, and Czech friends, who had experienced those few carefree, unrestrained years. Before the war the majority of Laco’s friends weren’t Jewish. And neither were his first loves.

I had also started making friends with Gentile girls. For instance, there was my Czech classmate Alenka. I would go to her house and she came to ours. But before I could start making more friends or dating boys, we found ourselves abruptly ejected from the non-Jewish community. By the school year 1939–1940—in my year five and six at gymnázium—we Jewish students began to keep to ourselves. My friends and I withdrew, took up a defensive stance, even though I don’t recall any nasty looks or comments. By then the first anti-Jewish laws had come into force, the stores owned by the parents of some of my friends were being shut or aryanized, and we felt insecure and threatened, affected by discrimination.

Let’s backtrack a little. I presume that you started your education at a Jewish school?

That’s right, I went to a five-year primary school, but only for the first four years. Children in year four could apply to go to secondary school, and I took this opportunity (admittedly, it was my parents who decided that) and I got accepted at a gymnázium. There were two Jewish primary schools in Prešov. The Orthodox one was much bigger, but I went to the Neolog primary school, which was located in a building right next to the Neolog synagogue. The avenue of trees leading to the school went slightly uphill toward the Táborisko villa district. In winter, on our way home from school, we would slide along the ice together with girls from the Catholic convent across the street.

Do you recall any of your teachers from that period?

I remember the Neolog school’s principal, Mr. Schwarz. He was a brawny man with a short, graying beard. He came from the Orava region and spoke a beautiful, melodious Slovak. He wrote a book retelling stories from the Bible, which was much admired by his pupils and their parents. He was also our religion teacher at gymnázium.

Another memorable teacher was Mr. Reich. He was also a teacher of religion and insisted that we address him as marmore, meaning teacher in Ivrit, the new Hebrew used by the Jewish settlers in Palestine. We knew that he was a member of Betar, a right-leaning Zionist organization. He focused mainly on teaching us to write Ivrit. I forget most of it, all I remember is that back in third and fourth form I started to learn the new Hebrew alphabet.

Later, in the gymnázium, an episode in one of the religion classes proved consequential. The classes were in the afternoon, we had them with Mr. Schwarz, whom I mentioned earlier. He used to deliver them in a sonorous, loud voice and in a highly theatrical manner, and one day, I was in year one or two of gymnázium, I noticed that sometimes when he spoke it made the windowpanes rattle. I whispered to Lucka Špirová sitting next to me: Luci, have you noticed that even the windowpanes rattle when the principal speaks? He went on and indeed, the glass rattled. Lucka and I looked at each other—she managed to quickly grab a handkerchief and pretend she was blowing her nose loudly, but I didn’t have a handkerchief and burst out laughing. The principal leaned down to me and said, very calmly: Come with me, my son. He used to address both girls and boys as my son. He gently nudged me toward the door, opened it wide, and screamed: Out with you! My father was surprised to see me come home early, and I told him that the principal threw me out of class. He said: Oh well, if he’s thrown you out, you might as well stop taking religion and take more French instead. This was possible during the first Republic. He wrote a letter to the school, requesting that I be exempted from religion classes, and no justification was needed. And so, because of the rattling pane of glass, I have never learned to read Hebrew. Later, under the Slovak State, no one could be exempted from religion lessons, including Jewish ones, and I ended up in class again.

You also had a governess. How important was she to you?

I had a governess from the age of four to eight. As I’ve mentioned, my father was a branch manager at a relatively big bank, and that gave him a certain status and, presumably, a decent salary. It was important for my mother that we maintain a certain standard of living, which meant having home help and a governess to teach me German from an early age. In those days German was by far the most important foreign language. At first, there were several young women I can no longer recall. But one day my beloved Adrienne, née Bouvoir, appeared in our family. Despite her French name she was Austrian, from Klagenfurt, her father was an architect and her mother had originally come from Brno. Her father had died quite early. After the Great War, when Austria-Hungary collapsed, Adrienne married an officer in Vienna. Her mother and older sister went back to Brno where her sister married a local German, so the mother stayed with them. But Adrienne’s husband died unexpectedly, and she joined her sister and mother in Brno. She was about twenty-six at the time.

My parents placed an ad for a governess in Ostrava’s German daily. Adrienne applied, because she didn’t want to be a burden to her family. This was her way of getting out of a difficult situation. But for me it was love at first sight. She won me over completely. She was a rather well-educated, multitalented person—she was good at drawing, she could even sew fashionable dresses and ladies’ suits by following patterns from magazines. She and my mother became quite good friends. Adrienne devoted most of her time to looking after me. She had no other obligations, except to help out in the household every now and then. She took me for long walks in the countryside and taught me to recognize flowers and trees. She would talk to me about everything almost like I was a grown-up: she took me seriously. I used to call her Brüdi. This was because at that point I insisted that I desperately needed a brother. Do you mean I’m not enough for you? And I said: Well, you are all I have, so you’ll be my Bruder. I called her Brüdi until the day she died, in 1972. Adrienne instilled in me a kind of German sentimentality that has remained part of me to this day. She used to tell me stories from the New Testament as if they were fairytales. I was totally devoted to her, maybe even more than to my own mother at the time. Later, when I had a little girl of my own, I told myself that I could never employ such a wonderful person to be with my child because it’s quite a serious competition at that age. But then I went and found the wonderful Selma Steinerová, who taught my daughter Julia German for many years.

So Brüdi fitted well into your family?

Absolutely. Adrienne’s sister had a little girl, Suse, who was two years younger than me. After we both started going to school, we became pen pals. Adrienne taught me German, writing the Gothic script, and right from the start she’d drum the correct spelling of the words into my head. I learned to write Latin script at school, mastering both almost in parallel. Adrienne put down roots in Prešov for good. By a lucky coincidence she also found a husband. We had a few fine silver trays on top of the cabinet in our living room, which included bowls made of cut glass. One day, as she was helping around the house and did some dusting, one of the cut glass bowls cracked. The virtuous Adrienne immediately ran to a jeweler’s store in the High Street where these kind of trinkets for middle-class homes were sold, and asked the owner, Mr. Ladislav Hartmann, to be so kind as to order a bowl to replace the one she’d damaged. The confirmed bachelor from a good Jewish family was so impressed that he instantly fell in love with her. Adrienne was a tall, good-looking blonde—and before long they were married, despite protests from his family. For Adrienne this was a way out of her predicament, and in Prešov it caused a sensation with a slight whiff of outrage, because in the eyes of the small-town folk, she was just kinderfrajla, a nanny, rather than a young lady from a good family who had fallen on hard times because of the war.

Did you keep in touch after she got married?

We did. I was eight when Adrienne got married and left us. But I kept going to her house twice a week for German lessons. For as long as I lived in Prešov I visited her regularly. Later I would be accompanied by various boys who’d say, oh, come on, why can’t we go for a stroll instead of you going to a German class with your former governess. But no boy could stop me from seeing my Adrienne. She remained and will always remain a very important person for me. Growing up, I would tell her all those things I didn’t feel like confiding in my mother. We spoke only German, as she never did learn to speak Slovak properly.

Was your childhood spent mostly in Prešov, or did you have some other favorite places?

We used to spend the summer in the Bardejovské kúpele Spa and these vacations are among my most treasured memories. The resort had recently been modernized and several members of my extended family served on the board of trustees, so maybe it was partly to give the town a boost that the family tradition developed of spending our summers at the spa. The women used to relocate there for the summer lock, stock, and barrel with all the pots and pans and other utensils, while their husbands would drive or take the train for the weekend from Prešov or Košice, neither was far away. We would decamp as soon as the school year was over and stay until September. We stayed in a rented villa on a hill overlooking the spa park, built in the classic country manor house style with a portico and a porch, and about seven rooms. Behind the house there was a garden or, to be more precise, a steep meadow leading to a forest. The villa was on the edge of town, though still very close to the center. We shared it with my father’s sister, Aunt Adél from Košice, and her husband. Their son Paul and daughter Edit would join us for short periods; they were almost grown up by then. My cousin Peter, who was my age, also stayed there with his parents—my mother’s brother Leopold and sister-in-law Malvínka. Another aunt, Šárika Poláková, and her son Jani rented a house just around the corner.

Those wonderful summers were paradise to me. We used to race around town on our scooters. There was a new swimming pool at the edge of the forest and that was where my father taught me to swim. Sometimes he could be rather strict. As soon as I managed to swim about three strokes on my own, he said he would hold me while I got used to swimming a bit further. In those days we didn’t have inflatable rubber rings, only bands made of cork that would just about buoy your body up. He guided me into deep water where my feet could no longer reach the bottom. Suddenly I had a strange feeling, as if I wasn’t being held securely enough. I turned around to see him standing there, arms folded across his chest, watching me. I began to sink, very slowly, cork and all, but he just kept watching. He waited until only the tip of my nose was poking out of the water before pulling me out. He gave me an awful fright, that’s why I remember it to this day, but I had such respect for my father that I put a brave face on and wasn’t put off swimming.

You mentioned your cousins. Were they a part of your immediate family?

The family structure on my mother’s side was rather complicated. My mother was the only daughter from the second marriage of Jakub Fuchs, a corn wholesaler. She was a whole generation younger than her four stepsisters. The eldest, Gizela, had three children, who were the same age as my mother and they grew up together. She was particularly close to one of them, her cousin Ernő. They shared a love of music. He liked to play the violin and was quite good at it, while my mother liked to show off her piano playing. Another aunt of mine, Jetta, had a daughter called Šárika and she, too, was only a couple of years younger than my mother. So, technically, Ernő and Šárika were my cousins, but because of the age difference I regarded them as my uncle and aunt, and that’s also how I addressed them. Šárika was a great beauty. My husband sometimes mentioned that he already took a fancy to her at high school. She was a pampered lady, whose husband was making good money. She claimed she had a heart problem. She would lie in her beautifully made bed and receive visitors—close friends—once a week, in a gorgeous nightdress, like French kings during their levée. Her parents—Uncle Móric and Aunt Jetta—owned vineyards in the Tokaj region, where they spent every spring and summer. They would return to Prešov when the wine harvest was over. That was how I always knew that winter was coming. And two of my mother’s stepsisters lived in Spišská Nová Ves, a few kilometers south of Levoča.

Mother also had one, much older, stepbrother, who had an only son, Peter, late in life. His wife was well over thirty and he was about fifty, something that was quite unheard of in those days. Peter was exactly my age and Šárika’s son Jani was one year younger than me, so the three of us grew up together like siblings. Both their families lived in downtown Prešov, a stone’s throw from our house. Peter and I were in the same class at primary school as well as gymnázium.

So you grew up mainly with boys?

I did, for a while. When I was little, these two boys were my main playmates. Neither my mother, nor my governess Adrienne, brought me up to behave in a girly way. They were happy for me to do sports, to run and jump about. Tomboys were all the rage back then. In the late 1920s and 1930s Prešov fell under the spell of the Berlin fashion for short haircuts, and independent, confident women with flat chests and sporty figures were the ideal.

My almost exclusive friendship with Peter lasted until my eighth birthday. It came to an end during our last summer in Bardejovské kúpele, when Peter broke my leg. He learned how to trip me over with his foot and I worked out a countermove to dodge him. We used to play this game on the steep meadow behind our house. That day I was wearing white cotton lace-up shoes that came up above the ankle. I hated those shoes with a vengeance but was made to wear them, as they were supposed to make my legs shapely. So Peter stuck out one foot and I was about to step aside, but then he suddenly had a better idea: he twisted his leg around mine. We both fell and tumbled down the slope. I looked at my foot and I saw it spilling out of my shoe, that’s how swollen it was. He’d broken it just above my ankle. It was terribly painful. I started screaming and half of the resort came running up. My parents called an ambulance that took me straight to the hospital in Prešov where the doctor, my uncle (or rather, cousin) Ernő, straightened my leg and put it into a plaster cast. (Many years later, as an adult, I showed my broken leg to Ernő’s wife Katka and told her: Look at the bad job Ernő has done on my leg, it’s all crooked. And she said: Show me your other one. I did and she said: See, that one is even more crooked.)

I had to have my leg in plaster up to my knee for three or four weeks. That’s when my father taught me to play the card game mariáš, and others read books to me to keep me amused as far as possible. Adrienne fashioned a huge slipper out of rough canvas for my hurt foot and promised that once the plaster cast came off, we’d go and see Peter and hang the slipper above his bed, to remind him of what he’d done to me. And that’s exactly what we did.

Well, around that time my parents decided that maybe what I needed was a girlfriend who would be less wild, and that it wasn’t a good idea for me to spend so much time with Peter and indulge in these rough games.

Is that when you started making friends with girls as well?

My parents found me a friend, Marianna, the daughter of friends of theirs, the Egers. They arranged for us to meet and, oddly enough, it worked out: we got on really well right from the start. Except that Marianna was also brought up as a tomboy so we went on behaving just as before, and our interests stayed the same. Marianna and I made a rather curious couple: she was strikingly tall for her age, with broad shoulders, while I was the smallest girl in town, but that never bothered us. We used to go to the movies and avidly collected pictures of movie stars that we cut out of illustrated magazines and stuck into scrapbooks. On the eve of a movie premiere, we would wait until the bill posters finished covering the walls with bright movie posters and snuck over and peeled them off before they dried. Back home we would cut out huge pictures of actresses: those were our special trophies.

Your father was a banker but those were uncertain times—is that something you felt at home?

Although I was still a quite young, I was aware of the Depression. Not just because I heard people speak about it and because the terms unemployed and unemployment kept cropping up in conversations, but because it actually affected us directly. As I’ve mentioned, my father was the manager of a branch of the Slovak General Credit Bank, I think that’s what it was called. Sometime around 1932 he had to leave the bank. I was eight years old at the time and heard some mutterings, and later learned more from adults’ conversations. The environs of Prešov and the entire Šariš region were a forestry area, with lots of timber trade. I guess that my father, who enjoyed card games and was quite a gambler, was equally willing to take risks in business. And I think that a deal he’d come up with, in his capacity as bank manager, had gone wrong. I don’t know if it had to do with the overall economic crisis, but the fact remains that he lost the bank some money and got fired. As is still common in the banking business, he got a rather nice golden handshake. We were living on the High Street, in the back of the bank building, and we were allowed to stay there for the rest of the 1930s, even after my father was fired.

For a year or two after he was sacked, my father kept looking for another job. My mother took it quite badly: it really bothered her because she was very status-conscious and cared a lot for appearances and social conventions. This was one quality in her that I disapproved of. (I was still quite young when I noticed that in company my mother had a rather affected way of laughing.) While my father was a bank manager, they were able to live the high life and attend the three or four main balls of the season. My mother would order her ball gowns from Vienna, and sometimes, though rarely, she went to buy them in Budapest. It was common for Prešov ladies in her circle to make regular shopping trips to Budapest. After my father lost his job, my mother stopped going to balls and I felt really sorry for her. I remember her telling me: Stop it, don’t feel so sorry for me, you’re making me even more sad.

My father later founded a small bank of his own, called the Prešov Credit Treasury. He must have drummed up some capital, convinced some investors, drawn up a business plan, and launched his bank. He put all his money into it. The bank premises were on the ground floor of one of those beautiful neo-Renaissance buildings on the High Street. He brought in some local notables as trustees, including a future Slovak State bigwig, Gejza Medrický, I think. My father must have been rather good at his job and the bank became quite prosperous. But he could pay himself only a modest salary. We certainly weren’t on the verge of starvation, but we had to rather draw in our horns.

Your relatives on your father’s side lived in Košice. Did you visit each other?

My father came to Prešov from Košice, but he wasn’t born there. His father worked for the railways—come to think of it, it’s quite astonishing that in Austria-Hungary a Jew could become an employee of the railways, that is, a state official, and even be made stationmaster. So my father was born in 1888, in Satu Mare, in what is now Romania, but at the time was part of Hungarian Transylvania, known in Hungarian as Szatmár. After that my grandfather was posted to the south and became stationmaster in the puszta, the Hungarian plain, in the small town of Kiskunhalas, if I remember right. My memory of this small station has become merged with the one in the movie Closely Watched Trains. I never met my grandfather but imagine him as the train switchman Hubička, as played by Josef Somr. One of the stories my father told me made a deep impression: he said that fast trains didn’t stop at their small station, only cargo trains were shunted up and down and then left standing there for a long time. As a young boy, when he wanted to go to their garden, my father used to crawl under the freight carriages. Once, he had just climbed out from under a train and found his father towering right above him. He slapped him so hard my father never felt like crawling under trains again.

But that didn’t stop my father from loving trains. When he took me for a walk (my mother insisted I should be out in the fresh air for at least an hour a day), whenever possible we’d go onto a railway bridge and stand there watching the switches being thrown. My father loved the lowlands. Sometimes he would recite a poem by the Hungarian poet Petőfi to me: oh, Lowlands, you are beautiful, at least you’re beautiful to me … I thought it was amusing back then, as I much preferred the hills, no matter how lyrical he waxed about the beauty of the wide vistas and slow sunsets.

My father was sixteen when his father died and he went back to Košice with his mother, older sister Adél, and younger brother Árpád. That’s where my father went to business college, still in Austro-Hungarian times. It was a Hungarian school, as Hungarian was the dominant language in Košice. My father had never lived in a Slovak-speaking environment. When he came to Prešov as bank manager, he considered this a great handicap, and for some time Professor Žilka, who taught Slovak at the Lutheran college, would come to our house and give him Slovak lessons.

Your parents spoke Hungarian with each other and with you, your governess spoke to you in German, at school you spoke Slovak—which language did you use with your peers, your cousins, and your best friend?

With the children I only ever spoke Slovak. Once I started school, we all switched to Slovak pretty quickly. In the gymnázium it was fashionable to speak in the Šariš dialect during breaks. We had many classmates from the surrounding villages, who came every day on special commuter trains. We called them the train kids.

Your Aunt Adél, your father’s sister, came to play a key role in your later life, didn’t she?

Aunt Adél was five years older than my father. She married her cousin Zoltán Farkas, a lawyer. The Great War broke out shortly after their wedding and he was drafted into the army. They had two young children—my cousin Edit was born in 1911 and her brother Paul in 1913. As the front approached from the north, Aunt Adél fled with the children to Budapest, where she was officially notified that her husband had been killed. But she wouldn’t believe it and insisted it couldn’t be true: she would surely have felt something. And lo and behold, Uncle Zoltán did come back, although not until 1919 or 1920, via a horrendous detour through China and Siberia. He returned an ardent social democrat and even after starting to practice as an attorney in Košice, he remained actively involved in politics. He was among those who founded the Hungarian Social Democratic party, which later merged with the Czechoslovak Social Democratic party. In the early 1930s he was elected to Czechoslovakia’s Senate. Aunt Adél wasn’t very happy about his political activities, especially his frequent trips to Prague.

I often visited with the family in Košice, as my grandma Róza lived with them. They lived in a large apartment in what was then Legionnaires’ Square, directly opposite the marketplace where Aunt Adél often took me to buy fruit and vegetables. My grandma was a kindly woman. She had her own room and that’s where I used to stay during my visits. My grandma loved playing solitaire and talking politics. She read the newspapers and followed political events—she was the one who told me what went on during the Sino-Japanese war. I had a nice time in Košice, although Aunt Adus, as I called her, was very strict. I kept telling my mother that sending me there was a kind of punishment, like being sent to a correctional institution. Aunt Adus taught me all sorts of things like how to crochet and embroider but, mainly, how to do the cleaning. She would check if I’d left the bathtub wiped dry. She made me wash my stockings or socks every night and would then check if I’d done it properly. She was rather gruff although, as I discovered later, she was also very self-sacrificing. But she found it hard to relax, have fun, or show affection. The only person who knew how to bring her out of herself somewhat was her son Paul. Only he was able to make her relax a little. She doted on him and all he had to say was, come on, Mom, and a smile would appear on her face right away.

I was very close to my Košice cousins Paul and Edit: it was almost as if they were my siblings even though they were more than ten years older than me. We were extremely fond of each other right from the word go, as long as I can remember. I started spending vacations with them when I was around nine. While I was there, cousin Paul would take me to the student korzo in Košice with him, introduce me to a girl called Ilonka or perhaps Erzsike, and the girls would be falling over backward to be nice to me. Three months later I’d be back and ask Paul: Are we going to see Erzsike? And he’d ask: What Erzsike? Later on, during school vacations, he used to take me along to the swimming pool. I would hang out there with his group of university friends. I was a kind of mascot of theirs.

Cousin Edit was already married by then. She and her husband, the architect Béla Zinner, had a beautiful house, with modern, functional furniture. I just loved that. Edit suffered from some chronic ailments and had to spend a lot of time in bed. When she saw how hard her mother, Aunt Adél, was pushing me, she brought me to her house, and after that whenever I was in Košice I usually stayed with her. I would sit by her bedside, and we’d fool around and have great fun together. We would fill a washtub with water in her small garden and sit in it, splashing about, taking nude pictures of one another, that kind of nonsense. I was eleven and she twenty-four. We became so close that I would write her long, long letters after I got back to Prešov. All these cousins, and later Marianna, were a kind of substitute for the brothers and sisters I never had, which is probably why these relationships have been so unforgettable for me.

In the transcript of your contribution to the oral history project on Holocaust survivors I read that family relationships meant a great deal to your mother, that she and her sister kept regularly in touch through postcards. You also mentioned that when you visited your aunt in Spišská Nová Ves and wrote to your mother, you signed your postcards as Heda’s little girl. Why was that?

As I’ve mentioned, my mother had four stepsisters but none of them treated her as a stepsister. For them she was the little baby sister whom they loved dearly and she loved them back; they had a wonderful relationship. Her eldest sister Giza, Ernő’s mother, died when I was still very young. Two other sisters lived in Spišská