“We woke up one day and mom was gone. When we cried, somebody told us, she had to leave, but that she will be back soon. So we calmed down a bit. You can’t even imagine those little children’s souls… Like little nestlings, so frightened we were that we sat the whole day in the kitchen and waited when our mom would return home.”
“Somewhere in the yard she had a hole dug and prepared to be able to sit inside until the war ended. Secretly we used to walk around, quietly singing, so that she heard us and we talked together.”
“You probably didn’t talk to her, but just to each other so that she heard you, is that right?” “Yes, that’s right. She used to cry when he heard us. However, if she didn’t hear us, she would be worried about us, about what happened to us. We didn’t want to walk that way with my sister – assuming mom didn’t know about us anyway, as we couldn’t hear her. But then one of my mom’s good friends told us, that mom needed to hear us, to make sure we were all right because of how much evil was in the world. She explained us the situation and since then we used to walk around there and sing. We even looked up different kinds of poems in magazines mentioning the word mom and that’s what we read to her. This way we would go there as to study – but for real we were reading to her, to make her happy.”
“If it had spread out more, she would’ve needed to change the place of hiding immediately. It didn’t work in a way that she went somewhere and stayed sitting there. During a short period of time she was at various different places. Always at a different household, in their yard or cellar.”
Jolana Kucíková was born on February 14, 1938 in the village of Lutiše, in Žilina district. She grew up together with her three siblings in a family of teachers. Her mother was a Jew and her father had Catholic origin. They survived the war in Lutiše, where they had to intermittently hide themselves. After the war Jolana worked at the sales department of a textile factory near Žilina and later she moved with her husband to Bratislava. She has one daughter, granddaughter and a grandson. She died on 16th December 2020 in Ohel David senior house in Bratislava
