Peter Peleg

“My name is Peter Shlomo Peleg. But I was born as Peter Politzer. The family came from the Czech town of Polička, hence we were a Czechoslovak family.” – “Where were you born?” – “By coincidence I was born in Vienna, in Austria. But it happened this way only because my father was a doctor and my mother had had a complicated delivery, and he insisted she needed to give birth there. My older brother was born in Bratislava, where my father was an assistant teacher at the faculty. And this delivery was difficult, therefore it was decided that I had to be born in Vienna, because the hospital was better than the one in Bratislava. It took my mother 12 hours to give birth to me, it was even worse than in Bratislava (...) We lived in Čadca, ´the centre of the universe,´ north-western Slovakia. My father was a doctor in the Czechoslovak State Railways, so we could travel for free, basically. This is why I was born in Vienna, otherwise we lived in Čadca all the time. I was born 1925, it’s been a couple of years now. Till January 1949 we lived in Slovakia, then we moved here (to Israel). I married a woman who came from Slovakia, from Nové Město nad Váhom, unfortunately she passed away 15 years ago. So I married for a second time. And as it happens, her father also came from Nové Město nad Váhom, and her mother from Topoľčany. Well, she is an Asian, born here in Israel, thus I remained a true-born Slovak. That’s all about me.”

“One year during the war, from 1942 to 1943, I obtained false documents from a friend of mine. As a pure member of the Aryan race I lived in a ´labour´ camp. Regulation of mountain streams, State Building Authority of the Ministry of Interior of the Slovak Republic. That was the company’s name. We were regulating streambeds of mountain streams, which run down from the mountains, and especially in spring, during thaw, they cause flooding. Although I had only five grades of secondary school, I was considered an intellectual. I was doing the surveying. My job was not a difficult one. (…) My boss knew that I was a Jew, but still he had sent me to this company. Thus I was doing relatively fine. In April 1943 they even sent me to the Tatra Mountains, near Liptovský Mikuláš, it was a difficult time. I thought that I was sent there because I was so smart, because I was surveying so well. But the reason they sent me was that there was a threat of some raids by Slovak gendarmes. They were not looking for Jews in particular, but mainly for deserters from the Slovak army, who did not want to join the Slovak army against the Russians. This was already after Stalingrad. They were looking for them, and therefore I they rather sent me for this training course. In summer 1943 I was helped by one priest, who was a friend of the then president Dr Tiso, who knew my father, because they had been playing cards together every evening. He advised my father not to hide me, but to have me registered at the local office as a Jew, and the village notary would then sign me up as a Jew assigned to the local authority. This was in July 1943, he died five years ago. I stayed there till August 1944. This was completely legal, nobody interfered with that, and I lived there legally with my parents and under my own name. They forgot that I had had a different name before. I was Peter Politzer again.”