Avraham Brichta

“He said that they should let us go. So they called for Melanie Brichtová and Arpád Ivan Brichta, they opened the door for us and we got out. I remembered the first German words I heard: ‘Was ist mit dieses Kind und Frau?’ What’s wrong with this woman and the child? And the Jewish official said: ‘Sie sind irrtümlich genomen.’ They took them by mistake. ‘In Ordnung,’ said the officer. So they let us go and we went to a priest in Topolčany, I think it was a brother of Tibor Toth. We were hiding there for two weeks. We didn’t know the raids were over and that there were no more transports to concentration camps.”

"When the Germans came he started to boil potatoes to create steam. It was full of steam. We all went upstairs. We went up the ladder, pulled the revolving door, went upstairs, sat there, than he closed it, took off the ladder and then nobody could recognize there was any entrance upstairs. Then two SS officers came (maybe they were from Wehrmacht) with pistols and revolvers. Second miracle, first was in Zilina, the second was there. They looked around; we were lucky they didn’t look upstairs. They weren’t so suspicious; they looked around for a while and then went out. We were lucky for the second time. The Red Army came in April and we went to a mountain (in Slovakia)."

“We were hiding for about a week or two then he became afraid that they could arrest and kill him. So we traveled to Trnava with fake documents and there we lived until August 1944. There were no exceptions at the time so we had to look for a hideout. That was another miracle or luck. There was certain doctor Neumann who had a practice in Trnava and Smolenice. His nurse’s name was Počúchová and she said she could hide him at her parents’ house. He asked her if they could hide us as well and they agreed to hide us all for three days. And those three days stretched to eight months. Mr. Počúch was a very nice man but he was poor. He had a house in Smolenice with a granary and a yard about hundred and fifty meters wide. We were six people hiding in the granary – our family and doctor Neumann with his wife and his nephew.”