Peter Lipa

“Of course, my father had problems with that. We came from the so-called mixed marriage and my father was convinced that since he married a Christian and had a daughter from this marriage, who was older than I, born in 1937, that he would be immune against what was happening back then. For sure he was aware of it, but he thought he could not be endangered. Unfortunately, he only thought so. The truth was that when I was only one year old, suddenly, one nice day my father was taken to the Gestapo Headquarters. It was on the opposite side of the crossroad in one house, where they imprisoned him for two months. There he was waiting for further transport, which took him away sometime in the fall of 1944. He had to get on and was deported to Auschwitz.”

“My mom got really scared and she feared that they might want to deport us, the children, as well, since we were born in the mixed marriage. Simply, she just closed the shop and we disappeared from Prešov. There was she, her mother, my sister and I. We had to be separated for some time, too. She and my sister went somewhere to Tatry, but my sister Katka immediately found new friends there, so mom was afraid, someone could recognize them. She returned home and finally she and her mother decided, we would go to Kláštor pod Znievom, where we could hide. The religious sisters accepted us there as orphans. Actually, this place was like an orphanage house. Mom and grandmother stayed somewhere in the village and that’s how we lived through the last months until Kláštor pod Znievom was liberated and the war was over.”