“During those years, I remember it as I was nine or ten years old, all the Jews around here, simple people, were locked up. I cannot tell you why. One of them went from village to village collecting feathers and he had a horse…Locked up! And for what? For owning a horse? My mom too, when she walked to work, she felt an StB agent watching her. My father and Mr. Stadler were not imprisoned. Except for them, everyone around was."
“In 1939, three siblings, the youngest brother and two sisters, left for Israel. My uncle, the dentist, along with my father and the other sister stayed. Father and uncle saved themselves but we don’t know anything about the sister. She was hiding somewhere in Budapest and was probably shot down in the Danube river; we don´t know. And my father´s brother, the uncle who was a dentist, he and his family even got christened and arranged for other things as well. In 1944, they had a daughter. My aunt was a laboratory technician, but they were taken anyway. They took them to the Sereď concentration camp and they managed to flee from there. They carried poison with them. In case there was no place to hide the little one, and she was three months old, they would all poison themselves. They left the girl, she was named Katka, in Močenok with some strangers. It was the Varga family; they did not have children. They had many difficulties with hiding the child. Aunt and uncle were both hiding in different places. After the war was over, they both reunited with their daughter. “
“Thank God, my grandfather died in January, so he did not have to go through that horror and grandmother was 47 years old at the time. My mom had a twin, and they both went to Auschwitz as twenty-years olds. When they arrived at Auschwitz, they were immediately lined up for inspection. Mengele was there and asked to separate the twins from the others because, allegedly, he experimented on twins. He wanted the German race to be pure and the German women to deliver only twins. And he was making experiments. But one of the inmates told them: 'You don’t know each other!' Forty-seven-year-old grandma was sent directly to the gas chamber and those two struggled through as best as they could. Mom had a number 23384 tattooed on her arm; my aunt had the number that comes before or after. Anyway, they had adjacent numbers.”
Alžbeta Šalátiová, née Neuwirthová was born June 6, 1947, in Farná. Her parents were Pavol Neuwirth, born on October 24, 1911, in Močenok and Helena Neuwirthová, née Lengyelová, born on April 2, 1924, in Kisbér. Both the parents lived through the Holocaust. Her mother survived the Auschwitz, Kraków-Płaszów and Gross-Rosen concentration camps. During the war, her father was a member of the Hungarian forced labor unit (munkaszolgálatos). Following the German occupation of Hungary, he was deported to the Mauthausen concentration camp. After the war, Alžbeta´s parents married and opened up an inn in Farná which was nationalized in 1952.
