“The railwayman helped us to get on one of those transit cargo trains and he hid us under some boards. They had agreed with the engine driver that he would speed up a little bit once he passed Košice. Thus he arrived a bit earlier to some little village behind Košice where he had to wait before the station master there gave a signal that he could continue to the station. The engineer thus had to stop the train for a while. At that moment we jumped out and walked to the nearest village where somebody was supposed to wait for us, but there was nobody there. The sun began to rise. (...) We were handed over to the Slovak police and then transported to Trebišov.”
“She would spend all days and nights on the first floor. If there was a house search, and this happened several times, we had a hiding place prepared for her in a closet, and another one under the roof. When the guards came to search our household, they officially came to check if we had surrendered all that was due, but actually they came to search for my sister. She would always hide in that closet, and fortunately they never found her.”
“Out of the forty families there, there were three that were friendly to us and that were absolutely open about it. I used to go to their homes and work with their horses. On the other hand, there were three or four other families that were determined to get the Jews out of the village. This was my practical experience from one village (Granč-Petrovce), bit I think it could be applied to all of Slovakia.”
“I came to realize that when they ousted Slánský. At that moment I understood that ´there was something rotten in the state of Denmark´ I was listening to the court trial broadcast on the radio when I was doing my military service, and the people there were accusing one another of nationalism, Zionism and animosity towards this country without any evidence whatsoever. They were simply accusing themselves and the others of conspiracy. I realized that this political regime was evil and that there was no future for me here.”
“If the decision is negative, do not write to us, because we would like to hear it personally. I said that if it was negative, my mom was determined to send it to the press (in Canada). That was in autumn 1966 and the preparation for Expo 1967 in Montreal was underway. The Canadian government included one condition in the agreement about Expo, requiring Czechoslovakia to allow emigration of families that had been separated. We did not know about this, because this agreement was secret in Czechoslovakia. My mom didn’t know about it either, but our names got onto a list of some 200 people which the Canadian government presented to the Czechoslovak government. Together with our perseverance this eventually helped in the decision that our request was granted.”
Tomáš Oráč is a Canadian citizen of Jewish origin who comes from Spiš in Slovakia and who lived in Czechoslovakia after WWII. His parents spoke mostly Hungarian or German at home, but he grew up in a purely Slovak village called Granč-Petrovce on the foothills of Mt. Branisko. He learnt Hungarian and German later from his parents and in school, but his native language was Slovak. He and his mother, who worked as a manager of a large farmstead, were excluded from the deportations of Jews. They were hiding his adult sister throughout the war. In 1943 they tried to escape to Hungary, but the attempt failed. They spent the Slovak National Uprising hiding with strangers in the mountains. Tomáš studied chemistry after the war and he began working in a chemical factory in Litvínov. His mother and sister emigrated to Israel and later to Canada. In 1964 he went to Canada to visit his mother and while there he made a definite resolve that he would emigrate there with his entire family. In 1967, after long “struggle” with Czechoslovak authorities he managed to emigrate legally to Canada with all his family (wife and two daughters). He found employment there as a chemical engineer. Since 1975 he has been living in the United States. He currently resides in Ohio.
