Ján Lenský

“Yet I haven’t told you what my parents were doing in concentration camps. Unlike my father, my mother used to talk about it. She told me what he was doing there because he said only a few words about it. He had something like an office work there. Actually, it was very different from it. When the burnt corpses got out of the gas chamber, he had to extract their gold teeth. And as we know these days, Germans used to send that gold to Switzerland.”

“We decided to join a partisan group. They took us as civilians, my mother, my father and me. However, we weren’t prepared for that kind of life at all. They didn’t have… It was very exhausting for absolutely untrained civilians. You know, we didn’t walk the paths; we went right through the forest, up and down. We were soaked. My mother wore such a felt boots which soaked up the water, so she couldn’t walk at all. They were behind. They couldn’t stand it any longer, but they convinced me to keep going with partisans. They wanted to return back to Levoča and hide there. I didn’t want it, I was exhausted. Sometimes we didn’t have anything to eat for many days. I used to cry the whole day, but I kept walking. Then I had no idea what had happened to my parents. I stayed with the partisans, but once I saw that they were heading to Poland, where I didn’t understand the language, I became really fearful. Later, when we came to Stará Ľubovňa, there was a river and a bridge over it. The bridge was watched by Germans and as partisans came there, shooting started, bullets flew around us, I had fear, of course, and then Germans took some men as captives. I can recall that there was absolute silence, nobody moved. Suddenly I heard a voice speaking German. It was one of the captives begging for mercy. He said: ‘My wife and children are waiting for me at home.’ Then, it was silence again. But I heard such a strange rattling then. They cut his throat. I didn’t want to go with the partisans any more. I decided to go back to Levoča.”

“They were lying there just like some sardines. There were no extra places, so when they had to go to the toilet at night, after coming back their place was gone. What could they do? They lay somewhere else and it went this way all night. My mother managed to get there somehow. And she used to complain about Russian women who were such pigs that they usually didn’t go to the toilet, but did it right there on the bunk bed, so the urine dripped down for the whole night.”

“Finally I decided to stay [in England]. It had something to do with my studies. I wanted to study music there. You know, before the war Czechs had their golden treasure in a bank in London. And when the Nazis came, they froze it all. The money was later used for scholarships for Czech students. And I managed to get one, so I could stay there. I studied at the Royal College of Music for several years and my emigrant life began there, too. My parents, my father, who was a shopkeeper and a trader and who had lost everything because of the Czech coup d'état, the first one, came as well. He immigrated to London along with my mother and thus we met again.”

“There were various Jewish orientations. We preferred the way of assimilation before preserving our identity. Actually, as for that identity, we knew that when father disowned his son only because he married a non-Jewish girl, it preserved not only Jewish identity, but it preserved also anti-Semitism among people and we didn’t want to come into it.”

“[In Germany] we found out together that Nazism was a taboo topic, which people didn’t want to talk about at all. Once we were walking in a forest somewhere near the sea and there was a woodman, who was working with ‘Säge’, electric saw. The most probably he heard me speaking English with my wife, you know, in case you immigrate somewhere you have to learn a new language. I could speak German, but my wife couldn’t. Anyway, we have always spoken English in our household. Well, this man realised we were speaking English and came to us. I didn’t know how it occurred to him; he simply told us that during the war Jews used to work on this field. They lived in a camp in Kiel and everyday they were transported in ‘Anhänger’, you know when tractor has a kind of trailer, which was enwound with barbed wire. They had to stand and there were so many people that they couldn’t dodge. As they were on that field the trailer tilted from side to side and they were always screaming with pain when they fell on that barbed wire and all the other ended up lying on them. And he said: ‘When I was a boy I found it very funny.’ And he suddenly added: ‘Nowadays I feel ashamed about it.’ The German said these words then. It ‘beeindruckt’ me, it left very good impression on me.”