“It doesn’t matter what color your eyes are, what color your hair is, what color your skin is, we are all the same people... we don’t have to love everyone, but we have to respect every person on this earth... we all have a right to be here!”
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Gabriella Y. Karin was born on November 17, 1930 in Bratislava, into a family of Jewish origin. She was the only child of her parents, father Arpád Földes and mother Šavelta, née Kurková. Arpád, a businessman in body and soul, met Šavelta in Nitra, while working. It wasn’t long before they got married. They started their life together in Bratislava, where they owned a shop called Delikates. Since the parents were busy with work, it can be said that Gabriella grew up with her grandmother and was justifiably very close to her. She clearly had a very hard time enduring the subsequent separation from her grandmother in 1942, at the time of the raging Second World War, during which she was sheltered by a Christian family, the Blanárs, to avoid being transported. Anti-Semitism was felt even before the outbreak of the war, but people began to behave worse than animals, just at the time of the issuing of restrictive regulations, in relation to the Jewish population. Her whole family was attacked verbally, but also physically. From 1942, at the time of the deportations, Gabriella’s family hid in a warehouse near their Delikates store. Later, as Gabriella was officially adopted by her aunt Elena Binderová, who was baptized, she went to the Ursuline Monastery in Bratislava. She was part of the teaching process and also lived in a dormitory for one year, which saved her life. When the situation was calmer, she went back to her parents’ warehouse on Špitálska Street in Bratislava. After the arrival of the Germans, i.e. until September 1944, until the suppression of the Slovak National Uprising, the family hid in an apartment in the Slovak League, from where they were shortly sent away because they were Jews. They had nowhere to go. At the last moment, their neighbor Karol Blanár took them in, who at the same time was already hiding their aunt, his secret love. Gabriella was already hiding in his small apartment with her parents, their aunt, her mother’s two brothers and two friends. In difficult conditions, but in safety, they lasted until April 1945, until liberation. After liberation, Gabriella began studying at a local family school in Bratislava, where she spent the next three years. Since she was already a young woman, it was more than likely that love would also enter her life. František came from Dunajská Streda and was also of Jewish origin. After nine months, in October 1948, they decided to get married and spend the rest of their lives together. However, František made the marriage conditional on his decision to emigrate. The fact that the then Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meirová bought airplanes from Czechoslovakia along with several transports of young soldiers meant a ticket to Israel for two young people. In 1948, they managed to emigrate to Israel, and two months after them, Gabriella’s parents arrived with their belongings. Gabriella started doing embroidery there, and František rebuilt brick cars. Since Gabriella was suffering from health problems that she carried over from the Second World War, the doctors did not give her much of a chance to get pregnant. When they decided to adopt, after ten long years of trying, their only son, Ron, was born on September 18, 1965. In 1967, the family decided to emigrate again, but this time to the United States of America, Los Angeles, where they still live today. They were engaged in the same professions. Currently, Gabriella is engaged in sculpture and also lectures mainly at the Holocaust Museum and the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles. She has been a lecturer since 1992 and talks about what she unfortunately had to go through. Today, she basically lectures all over America, while students, teachers, policemen and the like come to her lectures.
