Giora Amir

“Those two Jewish partisans came to warn us that on 28th October the Germans would come all the way to Žiar, because they would come to revenge that attack. On the 28th the Germans started shooting at the village, but we already had our bunker ready. This is another story. There were Jewish refugees from Poland in Slovakia. They already had the experience, they knew how Germans reacted and what needed to be done and they said: ‘Listen, the uprising will take a long time. Go to the villages and start preparing bunkers high up in the forests.’ My father and somebody else thus took sons of farmers from Žiar with them and they went high up to the forests and they started digging out shelters in the ground in the forests, and they were called bunkers.”

“The Zionist movements fought for every child. We found Jewish children in convents, and they often did not remember at all that they were Jewish children, and we found children who had come back, such as my two classmates who had come back, and they parents have died. The youth movement gave them a Zionist alternative. There was a struggle for every person. Do you want to stay in Slovakia? Communists promise equality to you… Or: They are now fighting for the Jewish state in Palestine, and that’s another alternative. People had to decide at that time. They youth movement had a decisive influence on my wife and on me and others who have decided for the Zionist alternative.”

“On the outside, we were very orthodox Jews and my father was not too happy about my sister’s joining Hashomer Hatzair. He convinced me to go to the summer camp organized by Bnei Akiva, because youth movements were organizing summer camps. Bnei Akiva was a religious Zionist youth movement. Hashomer Hatzair organized a summer camp in Levočské Kúpele at that time and Bnei Akiva held the same camp in Baldovce. Baldovce is a spa, too, in eastern Slovakia. It was already in 1939, a very problematic year, and they already set our tents on fire.”

“Since we were an orthodox family, I attended a Jewish people’s school, where profane subjects were being taught in the mornings, and after lunch we would go to cheder. Cheder means a room in Hebrew, but it also signifies a school for religious matters. I started going there in 1934 when I was six years old and I completed the ordinary school in 1939. We were no longer allowed to study at grammar schools at that time; my sister was already studying at a grammar school, though, but we were not allowed to enrol there, because there was numerus clausus. Numerus clausus meant that four percent of students could be Jews, but those four percent were being set aside for Jews who decided to be baptized.”