Eva Benešová

“We were hiding once without mum and dad. I ran away from the shelter and played with water after the rain. I built little dams and I drew the attention of some Gestapo men. They said what a nice girl I was and told me to take them to mum – they must have thought I was a Jewish child – and I did. My parents came back in the meantime; they had to show their documents and take me and brother to the office. There, they said we were Jews and had false documents. Dad said: ‘What Jews?’ They said: ‘Look at the girl – such a Jewish child!’ Dad stood Petr on the table and replied: ‘Nonsense! Look at the boy!’ Good thing they didn’t want to see Petr naked, as he was circumcised. My parents got married and had my brother circumcised, although it was no longer common at the time.”

“Since we didn’t join the transport, the police and the Jewish Community officials searched for us. The housekeeper, Mrs Pižlová, let us hide in someone else’s flat; we had to lie under a sofa and be quiet. My brother, little Petr, had been born by then, and he was so small that it made no sense to tell him to be quiet, so mum blocked his mouth every time he started humming, crying or screaming. This is still his earliest memory: his mum choking him.”

“And dad obtained documents; I hope mum knows this perfectly – how dad managed to obtain documents from nothing. Try and tell, mum.” Eva Benešová gives the floor to her mother and she speaks: “He was smart. He went to a Slovak fishing club and said he was a fisher and lost his fishing licence, an asked for a copy. With no problems, they wrote it and stamped it – everything he asked for, they wrote, in the name of Pavel Kováč, which was his cover name. They wrote it all and gave him the stamp. So now he had a genuine document with a stamp, so he took it to various authorities and applied for copies of various birth certificates and what not. So, based on false information, he got [Eva Benešová adds: ‘He just said he’d lost one document, or all of them, something like that.’], well the fishing licence helped him and we got everything back in the name of Pavel Kováč. [Eva Benešová: ‘Not everything, just some of the papers, but they were very important. And why the name Pavel Kováč?’] Because there are thirty thousand of people with that name in Slovakia, so it was not strange.”

“So dad arranged for us to cross the border with Uncle Max who was in a different country. We were in Hungary, on the Hungarian territory in Lučenec; Slovakia was near and that’s where Uncle Max was expecting us and where we met him after the adventurous night walk. That night, my little brother Petr started speaking, at two years old. And he started speaking in Hungarian, he said “fonat” because he heard a train in the distance, and it was at a moment when we had to be totally quiet. So mum covered him with her huge breasts. When he grew up he emigrated after Charter 77, and when I met him sixteen years later, his earliest memory was that he could not speak because mum would choke him. What a stupid way to start communicating!”

“And they gave us lice. So they cut my hair and they cut all of my brother’s hair away. My hair used to be kind of light but then I grew hair that was pitch black, dense and curly. It was like a ball that you couldn’t even comb. [Witness’ mother: ‘She was such a black, curly, beautiful Jewish girl.’] Back to the story. They cut our hair and then we were somewhere else, I don’t recall where. We lived in a cellar in a village on the territory of the Slovak State. I stayed home with my brother and we were forbidden to go anywhere, but I wanted to go out. The rain was over and I played in the street with the water and mud. Suddenly someone stopped by me, wearing high boots and talking Slovak I guess, not German because I could not understand them; and they said, what a beautiful girl. They likely thought, ‘What is the Jewish child doing here?’ But aloud, they said, what a nice girl. And, ‘Where is your mum? Such a pretty girl.’ They took me by the hand and I still could not see them – just their boots, the tall boots. And I led them to our dwelling, our cellar. Mum returned in a moment and so did dad, and the men wanted their documents. So the parents showed them their documents and they still took them away with us, with Petr and me. They took us to an office and I don’t know if they were Germans, but more likely they were the local Nazis, Hlinka’s people; they wanted to see the documents again and said, ‘How come you have a Jewish child? You are Jews!’ [Witness’ mother: ‘I got down on my knees like a Catholic, started praying and made everyone pray the Catholic way.’] And dad said: ‘What Jews, excuse me?’ They said: ‘Just look at the girl – a typical Jewish child.’ And my brother was a blue-eyed blonde. [Witness’ mother: ‘He [her husband] stood up and said: ‘Did you have the child with a Jew?’] So they put up a show. Dad stood my brother on the table and said: ‘Just look, he’s a typical Aryan child.’ And they were quiet. My brother and dad were circumcised, but lucky they did not check. We do this on the eighth day after birth. They didn’t look but they didn’t trust us either; we had to pack up. I think there was not much to pack; there were fewer things left as we went, and they gave us an escort. A guy in a tall hat took us to the train and ordered us to go to Kremnička; they gathered Jews in Kremnička and, everybody knows this now, they shot them once they had gathered a certain number. This is how they murdered my grandmother Julie Pauncová Riedlová, the doctor’s wife. So that was our order, we had to board the train and the gendarme gave the paper to someone on the train. There were some German soldiers on the train, going on vacation from the front, and someone – not them – someone, though I cannot know who exactly, was supposed to turn us in for further procedures in Kremnička. The soldiers were merry and liked us, and they threw me in the air.”