“In short, I got in touch [with my relative] by phone, and we agreed when and where we’d meet, and she brought me there. Places like that were called bunkers, the Jews bunkered up there - that’s what it was called. She brought me to the bunker, my uncle and his family received me, of course; back then we were the largest group there, so we got the parlour, the largest room. We lay and slept on the floor - there was my uncle, his wife, his two children, his wife’s sister, and me, so there were six of us in one room. We had a major problem. My uncle snored in a terrible way. We lay next to the wall that separated us from the neighbouring flat, and we were terrified that the neighbours would hear the snoring. No one lived there officially. That’s when I learnt a skill I made good use of later as well - how to make a snoring person stop snoring.”
“They reckoned: ‘We’ll hole up in a shepherd’s hut somewhere, we’ll get in touch with mum or our parents, and they’ll provide us with food until the Russians come. There’s absolutely no point in going east.’ So they did an about-turn, and suddenly it was just the two of us, Bohuš Lešetický and me, on the hilltop. We didn’t have anywhere to go. So we carried on east, just the two of us, and our plan was to walk all the way to Prešov, and then onwards, to cross the front and reach the regions that had already been liberated by the Red Army. We walked and we walked, for a day and a half or so, when we suddenly came upon a little village tucked away in a valley. We didn’t know if the Germans were there or not, so we lay down and observed what went on in the village. We saw nothing, no Germans, so we reckoned we had nothing to lose, we couldn’t go on without food, so we entered the village. We found that the village was in rebel territory, the Germans weren’t there yet, the farmers welcomed us nicely, we were both taken in by different families.”
“I heard from them that the nearest city was Liptovský Mikuláš, which was still called Liptovský Svätý Mikuláš [Liptov Saint Nicholas - trans.], but I told them that I intended to go by train to Prešov. They told me I couldn’t go by train, that only those who reported to the local commandancy and received permission could travel. Like I said, I had false papers with me to the name of Ivan Blaho, and they helped in that one person who was going to Mikuláš took me in his cart. I had a little money, I went into Nehera, which was a nationwide clothes shop, and I bought myself a coat, a Lodenmantel it was called, a kind of green coat with round buttons, and I immediately felt very secure. I went to the German commandancy, I showed my Ivan Blaho credentials, and I was given a Passiererschein, a travel permit.”
“I want to go back a bit now. I said how the evening before, before I left my parents and joined the uprising, I informed them that I was leaving the next day. Dad, who had served during the first world war, sat on my bed and lamented, wept, and begged me not to go, because he said I had no idea what war was and that I would die in the very first battle. As an eighteen-year-old, I was convinced I knew better, and of course I didn’t listen to him. Then we said goodbye, from my dad’s perspective it was a final farewell, that we wouldn’t see each other ever again. And it really was like that. Except he thought that I would die in battle and he would survive. We had no idea that in the last months of the war, when it was already clear how things would end, that they would start deporting people again.”
Robert Cvi Bornstein was born on 23 February 1926 into a religiously minded Jewish family in Prešov. His father owned an ironmonger’s shop, his mother was a housewife; the witness had a sister, Marta, who was three years his elder. From his youth he was a member of the Zionist movement Hashomer Hatzair. He attended a grammar school in Prešov until 1940, when he was expelled and went into training as a baker. His father managed to secure for himself and later his family the status of “economically important Jews”, which temporarily protected the family from deportation. In the years 1942-1944 Robert Cvi Bornstein worked with his father in Prešov and later in Nitra, sorting out books that were confiscated from the home’s of deported people. In early September 1944 the witness joined the Slovak National Uprising as a volunteer. When it was quashed in October 1944 he returned in secret to Prešov and later travelled to Bratislava, where he hid in an abandoned flat together with his uncle’s family. He stayed in the hide-out until the end of the war - his sister survived the ordeal in a similar way. Their mother and father died in Auschwitz and the labour camp in Gleiwitz, respectively. After the liberation the witness graduated from secondary school while also actively working for Hashomer Hatzair - he headed a children’s home established by the movement, he was the leader of its Prešov group, and he was later put in charge of the emigration of young Zionists to Israel. He himself left in September 1949. In Israel he accepted the second name of Cvi and lived in a kibbutz, which he left after five years to study law. He worked as a lawyer for more than fifty years and still functions as a notary. He and his wife raised two sons and are now grateful for their four grandchildren. Robert Cvi Bornstein lives in Tel Aviv.
