My father was hiding in Hungary. My grandmother's younger sister worked in a Jewish hospital in Budapest. She hid my father there. Dad told a story that when the Gestapo came to the hospital, they quickly took him, saying that it was an emergency and that they were going to operate on him. There was nothing wrong with him at all, but he was already on the operating table and they wanted to take out even just his appendix to save him. This is the only thing he mentioned. He had been hiding there since about 1943/44 with his friend from the camp they had supposedly escaped from. I don't know exactly where that camp was, but he never talked about it in detail. When I asked him about it, he would always shout at me in Hungarian: Not now.
In 1948, my parents didn't get out because they closed the borders. Then the optometrist office was opening an my father was put in charge of building it up. But they wanted to emigrate. However, the authorities refused them to leave. I found papers saying that they didn't see any reason to emigrate because we were an independent family, so we didn't fall under family reunification. Novotny (the president of the Czechoslovak Republic) was the signatory. When I read the paper, I tore it up with anger, which made me sad. Why we didn't go out in 1968, I don't know. Maybe it was the fact that my father was the head of the optics, he was an expert, that's why he wanted to come back.
I have very fond memories of elementary school and high school. I only have one sad memory from high school. A classmate who went to both elementary and middle school with me had parents who were teachers. She was the only one who brought up my Jewish background in both elementary and high school. In elementary, she said that there was no Jew in school today because I was in synagogue. I didn't perceive that negatively. In high school she also had remarks about my ethnic background and especially at an high-school reunion five years later. I stood up then, said I would never be seen again, and left. My classmates at persuaded me to forget it, that the person saying it was stupid. I clearly told them that I would never come to a graduation reunion again. To this day, I'm sticking to that.
I had the feeling that these were events (the deportation of Jews) that they wanted to erase from their lives. In that way they didn't tell us about it and it had such a psychological and psychiatric explanation. It was a big trauma for them. My mother once sworn that she saw with her own eyes how my grandmother died, that she was shot by an SS man. This took place in Auschwitz.
Hedviga Forbatova comes from a Jewish middle-class family from Košice. The memoirist’s father’s name was Alfréd Forbát, born on July 9, 1923. Hedvig’s mother’s name was Valéria Karpová. She was born on September 12, 1924 in Košice. The parents probably met through sports at the swimming pool. Her father Alfréd originally wanted to study electrical engineering, but when he met the memoirist’s mother, She persuaded him to change schools and study optometry because her father owned and optician’s shop. Both parents survived the Holocaust in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. After the war, they tried to emigrate to Israel but were not successful. The witnesses’ childhood was beautiful. She spent it at the swimming pool and on the tennis courts, in the park and on her bicycle. In addition to school, she skied, went to music school and liked movies. She also wanted to study film, but eventually went to medical school. In 1968 she wanted to emigrate to Israel, but her parents were against it, so they stayed in Košice. After graduating from college, she worked at a hospital in Košice-Saca and ended her career at a children’s clinic. She welcomed the change of regime and the fall of communism in 1989. She regretted the dissolution of Czechoslovakia and feared the rise of nationalism under the Mečiarism. Today she is again watching the rise of nationalism and anti-Semitism, with regret.
