Miriam Rezek

“During the war, in 1944, my parents fled into the mountains in Orava. Mum was three months expecting. They looked for a place to hide, and Mum remembered one family in the place where they used to live. Mum and Dad were from Velká Bytča. So she remembered that someone lived there, and they went to them. The man told them they could stay, but so the Germans didn’t find out they were hiding there, Dad had to dig up a pit underneath the house. They hid there. They were there for six months. Mum was pregnant and it was very, very hard. It was in the winter - they’d come there in October. Two or three weeks before the war ended, the family that hid them there - Adamik there name was - begged my parents to leave.”

“So Mum had three children, eight grandchildren, twenty great-grandchildren. She always said she had won. She has a family, she has children, and the family lives on. Our family is here.”

“My brother weighed 900 grams, less than a kilo. There were still nuns in the hospital, and one of them told Mum he probably wouldn’t live, but that they’d do everything they could to save him. So one nun took Mum and said: ‘Come with me to pray.’ Mum said: ‘I’m a Jew, I can’t go with you.’ – ‘God is everywhere, come with me.’ So she prayed. She came back to the hospital and the doctor told her: ‘He’ll live. He will.’ And so it was.”

“Dani was born in 1945, two days after the war, on 11 May 1945. I was born two years later. In 1949 we came to Israel, and Mum gave birth to my brother Ilan; he died of cancer aged 54. We lived in Kiryat Motzkin; our father was a train technician. Times were very had, we hardly had any food to eat; Mum did other families’ laundry because we needed money. Three children, it was hard. It got better later on because our parents got compensation from Germany – that helped. I studied at university, I was in the army as a teacher.”