“We left for Hungary some time in early March 1942. I don’t remember the precise date. We went at night, and we crossed the border on foot, together with several other families with children. I was three and a half years old at that time. Since I could speak only Slovak, my father had administered some mild hypnotic drug to me so that I would not prattle and thus give away the whole group. Some trafficker guided us over the border, and obviously we had to pay some money to him.”
“We left all the furnishings in our apartment in Trenčín. Not just furniture, but pictures and other valuables as well. We carried only the most essential things in our luggage and we entrusted the things which we were leaving behind to several people who promised that they would take care of them. When we returned after the war, some people returned some things without any trouble. But some claimed that they didn’t know about anything and that we had never entrusted anything to them.”
“The situation in Hungary at the end of the war deteriorated, too. Both in terms of the situation for the Jews and the massive bombing of Budapest, when we had to rush into an air raid shelter several times a day. The shelter was built under the house where we lived. One bomb hit part of the building in which we lived and it caused severe damage. Food supplies got worse as well, and it was very difficult to obtain some food. Mom later told me that they were cooking goulash from horse meat, and the adults did not want to eat it, but children, me included, ate it with joy. You could buy pieces of meat from horses which had been shot and were lying in the streets.”
Zuzana Závadová was born June 12, 1938 in Košice in the Jewish family of Mr. and Mrs. Schwarz. Until 1942 she lived in Trenčín, where her father was a co-owner of a pharmacy. The pharmacy became confiscated and closed down after the establishment of the independent Slovak State. Her parents decided to emigrate to Hungary. For safety reasons, they lived separately in Budapest and they both used cover names. Zuzana stayed with her mother. Some time in early 1944, when the deportations of Jews began in Hungary as well, she was sent to an orphanage in Košice for some time. She does not know the precise dates nor for how long she stayed there, because no documents from that period have been preserved. Her parents took her from the orphanage to live with them in Budapest before the end of the war, because the administrators of the orphanage were unable to ensure her safety. Zuzana spent the remaining time until the end of the war in Budapest. In March 1945 the family was able to return to Slovakia, at first to Košice, where she re-enrolled in school. Afterwards she returned to Trenčín with her parents. She lived there throughout the era of the socialist Czechoslovakia until 1993 when Slovakia declared independence. Zuzana then emigrated for the second time in her life, this time to the Czech Republic. In 1963 she married Jan Závada, the son of the writer Vilém Závada, and their daughter Karin was born. In 2016 she lives in Prague 6.
