“When I think of it today, it was almost suicide. I got up one day in Modrá, boarded a train and went to Bratislava. Once there I took a tram to the state hospital. My mother was already dying in the hospital, and I went to visit her. Mum said: ‘Are you crazy? You came here?’ But I came all the same. I was actually the last of the family to see my mother before she died. Then I returned to Modrá. I got on a tram to get back to the station. And when I boarded the tram, there was one German standing inside - a neighbour. I knew that he’d recognised me. So I jumped off the moving tram and sprained my ankle. He didn’t follow me, he stayed in the tram. Then I returned to Modrá and stayed there until the end of the war.”
“And I heard they were looking for a head engineer for the Caribbean island of Barbados. So I went to the Ministry of Transport, where they were to find out who was to go, and I asked one of my colleagues there, whom I knew very well: ‘What is it?’ And he says: ‘Listen - you’ve got two candidates here already. If you want to be a candidate, write your own up as well.’ So I sat down and wrote it there by hand - the other two had typewritten their whole curriculum, who they were, what they could do, etcetera, etcetera - I say down and wrote in hand on a piece of paper... well, about a page or so. So I added it to theirs. My colleague from the Ministry of Transport, who was also a head engineer like myself, said: ‘I don’t want to decide between three head engineers, to choose who’s going and who isn’t. All three are equal.’ So he sent it to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. There they said: ‘We don’t understand this kind of thing, we can’t decide,’ and they sent it to Barbados. The people in Barbados liked that I had written mine by hand, whereas the others had it in type, so they chose me. One fine day they phoned me from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to say we were going to Barbados. My wife asked, where’s that? - I had to look it up in a map, as they say...”
“We were saved thanks to - and that’s what I want to tell you about - the thirty-six, thirty-seven of us lived in one villa, which was rented. Our neighbour next door was Engineer Karmazín. Engineer Karmazín was the chairman of the Nazi National Socialist Party of Germans in Slovakia. First in the whole of Czechoslovakia, then just in Slovakia. He basically ruled Slovakia. He was the one who received orders from Hitler what to do. This Engineer Karmazín was our neighbour, and he became close friends with my father. They visited the steam spa, schwitzbad, together every Saturday. And then they’d go for a small beer and goulasch to the Savojka, the pub. And then in forty-four... My father never wore the star. He said: ‘Kill me, but I’m not wearing the star.’ And he was walking along the street and Karmazín chanced to be going in the opposite direction accompanied by two bodyguards. When he saw my father, he moved two steps ahead, and as he passed by my father, he said: ‘Arthur, lauf weg!’ - ‘Arthur, run for it!’ So Dad came home and took my sister and me. Grandma wasn’t willing to run - she stayed in our flat. And we went and hid in Záhoří.”
"We left Bratislava in groups. Here in Israel we joined a kibbutz in Negeva, stayed there for schooling for a year. Then we moved to our own kibbutz. We took over a kibbutz that had very few members left, a lot of people had left it. It was in the Betshean Valley next to the Jordan. We were three groups of youngsters. Czechoslovaks, Belgians and locals, born in Palestine, who had just finished military service. We stayed there up until 1951, when there was a great crisis in the kibbutz movement. It was a quarrel between two socialist parties, a lot of kibbutzim broke up, and so it happened that there were only some ten people left. So we abandoned the place and our territory was divided between the neighbouring kibbutzim. My dad had just arrived from Czechoslovakia, so I lived with him in Netanya for a couple of months, worked as a coolant mechanic in a brewery. Some American brought these old brewery machines, of some engineer who made a brewery out of it, and he got a Czech brewer, Masařík was his name."
"There wasn't any work here (in Israel). Our government made sure, that was nice of it, that everyone had work of some sort. People plantedtrees. Or they moved piles of sand from one side to the other and back again. They got paid for it, so that it couldn't be said that someone wasn't working. There was great poverty here, everything was rationed using tokens. For instance a child would get six eggs a week, adults got two eggs a week. Bread was also rationed. Adults got three loafs a week. The only things that weren't allocated were vegetables and fruit, there was enough of those. We didn't even see meat. Chicken was for feast days. People saved their tokens for the feasts. They had to import everything in those days. They needed backing from the American Jews for that, and they couldn't back us up without state backing. That's when we started to turn towards America. But that annoyed Stalin. He decided to endorse the Arab countries, even though those were anything but Communist."
"Jews from all over Europe wanted to get away after the war, to Palestine. There were a lot of fugitives from Hungary and Poland. Neither Hungary nor Poland allowed them to leave. Many of those people moved to Czechoslovakia. The Czechoslovak government gave the stateless refugees 'Nansen' passports. The Jewish administration in Palestine, just before the end of its mandate, paid five dolars for each of those passports. My work for the Zionist organisation was, half a year before we left for Israel, that I carried money from Vienna to Prague. (Probably he actually meant from Bratislava to Prague - ed.) I was terribly afraid. Ten thousand dollars was a huge sum of money in those days. I always took the night train from Bratislava to Prague. I locked my compartment and I never slept. We organised the young people who carried on over the Czech-Austrian border to Italy and thence to Israel. That was with support from the Czechoslovak government. It gave Israel a lot of support in the first months. My personal opinion is that it was on Stalin's orders. He was convinced that Israel would be a Socialist state and his proxy in the Middle East."
"When the Six-Day War broke out, I was aboard a tanker that was supposed to take oil from Odessa. We arrived there on the first day of the war. They kept us waiting there for a week, without letting us dock, and then they came to tell us that they don't sell oil to Imperialists. So we left empty-handed."
"I must have been like the first Jew who returned to Bratislava with the Russians after the war. I hitched a ride on one of their trucks, 2nd of May, and we drove from Modrej to Bratislava, that's some sixty kilometres. When I got there, I was the first one there, actually, my father, my sister... they arrived after me. Most of our acquaintances that used to live in Bratislava and were returning from the mountains or from concentration camps, then most of them stayed with us for the first few days, until they found some other place. ...We had a Hungarian family in our appartment. They were villagers, the moment I arrived they fled. They were frightened."
„I must have been like the first Jew who returned to Bratislava with the Russians after the war. I hitched a ride on one of their trucks and we drove from Modrej to Bratislava, that‘s some sixty kilometres.“
Ezechiel Kama was born in 1929 in Bratislava, as Pavol Kálmán. He comes from a Sionist family, his mother was the viceprezident of the Women‘s International Zionist Organisation (WIZO) in Slovakia. His father was a metallurgy expert, and because of that he received a government exception that protected him from being deported to a concentration camp up until the autumn of 1944. After that he had a farmer hide him, working on his backwater farm near Pezink. At the beginning of May 1945 Kama hitched a ride to Bratislava with the Red Army. He learnt mechanics at a technical school in Bratislava, he was active in the Zionist movement. In 1949 he left for Israel, he was a kibbutzite till 1951. After that he worked as mechanic in a brewery, he spent about a year repairing heavy machinery at the Dead Sea potash opencast mine. In the mid-Fifties he joined the freshly formed Israeli merchant fleet. He cruised the world for almost forty years, ending up as a Chief Engineer. In the Seventies he lived with his family on Barbados for five years, where he tuitioned engineers in Barbados‘ ports, as part of Israeli international development aid. For several of those years he also acted as advisor to the Barbados Minister of Naval Affairs. Currently lives in Haifa.
