Ervín Schönhauser

"Not only the population but also the soldiers took part in this - and interestingly. We sealed the cabinets, I remember. We used to live in another place in Topoľčany, but also on Štefánik Square, next to today's town hall, where the mayor is located. And they came to us, they beat us violently, and my father took a blow to the head with an iron rod, and for the rest of his life, he had a brain scar up to the location of the brain. A scar! Then, of course, it was somehow being solved, etc. I do not know what the result was, who was believed to initiate all this, how legally these people were prosecuted, or whether they were held responsible. Until today, I am shaking from fear, I was four or five, but you can never forget those things, you take them to the grave with you."

"The clouds were drawing above us. So the quasi-exception that the father was indispensable, of course, didn't last long. This all broke out, respectively the Germans began to rage austere mainly after the outbreak of the Slovak National Uprising. The result of this rampage, etc., was that ... and there was simply no debating as to the Jewish population, preceded by Aryanization, etc., etc., on September 8, 1944, it could have been two or three in the morning, and that it was such an Indian summer, I remember, even though I was small, I was a few years old. The SS, the Gestapo, the guardsmen, who were accompanied by the at that time typical behaviour: the shooting in the air, around the church in Topoľčany, ostentatiously and demonstratively, one tank was circling... And shooting and screaming and a subsequent fight. So they attacked us in this way and in what we wore - but what we already wore - they took us, or literally dragged us to the court of the local Topoľčianske cinema Topoľ. Of course, there was already a gathered Jewish population destined for liquidation in concentration camps, and from there under the "already known conditions" we were dragged to Sered. I remember that. It was night, typical headlights, shooting, German screaming, tendentious guards and this company around. And in that Sered they drove us across the rails, and vis-à-vis to the other side, to what I already know today was the concentration camp in Sered. "