“I just know there was a raid on Jews and my grandma, I and my dad were taken away. However, we didn’t get to transports together, we were separated. Until today I don’t know where my father died. He has never come back. We were lucky and managed to return back home. And my mom was hiding at different houses throughout the whole war.”
“I have one memory, although I can’t say I would personally remember it, but rather I recall my grandma’s stories. When they deported us, I was only two and a half years old – and such a boy won’t sit still. They were transporting us in the freight cars and I was crawling back and forth, even through the already deceased people. So that is a story I know about.”
“There was only one shop with umbrellas in Bratislava and it was called Kleinen Bruder. There were two brothers who ran it. But since it was aryanized, they didn’t get anything for it. After the year 1945 they gave the shop back to us. A direct owner was not my mom, but my aunt, who received the shop back. However, when the year 1948 came, they were deprived of it again.”
Jozef Klein was born on March 18, 1942 in Bratislava into a Jewish family. During the war, the family shop of his parents was aryanized. Jozef and his grandmother were deported into Theresienstadt concentration camp. His father didn’t survive the Second World War, but his mother did, thanks to hiding in the mountains. When Jozef retired, he began to deal with his past and organized several trips from Slovakia to Theresienstadt. In January 2018, however, he succumbed to severe illness and died.
