Eva Schwebel

"My relationship with Slovakia was very difficult when I lived there. Of course, it was never talked about. That is, I was - after what I knew from my mother, what little I knew - it meant that I was... I am Slovak, I was born there, but I had, in a sense - it's not said either - but certainly when I was a child I hated the Slovaks. Because I was aware that what they did, what they did to my mother, what they did to the Jews... I didn't know the whole history. I'm only now discovering, these last years, the facts and so on. As a kid, I only knew what my mother told me. It wasn't taught in schools, it wasn't talked about. And now I'll try to answer your question: it wasn't talked about at all. Not among children at all, maybe it was talked about in families among Jews. But for the majority... for the majority society to ever talk about it - after all, it came only, I don't know, twenty or thirty years after I left, didn't it?"

"I have such memories of grey streets, everything was grey in our country, the houses, the streets. Then, as I told you - that inner fear that was not visible on the outside, but was always inside me. But what was fortunate: that my mother had many friends. My mother and father didn't get along very well, as I said before, so my mother was always dragging me to her friends. That was mostly a lot of Christian friends - even Jewish families. So I wasn't alone, I had good friends and I was always the best student, that was a must. My mom was a little difficult, she was a difficult person. I don't know what she was like before the war, but after what she went through, it was hard. She was very demanding." - "You mean demanding in the sense that she made a lot of demands on you?" - "Very big demands. And I could never really satisfy them. That was a little difficult. Because I don't think anything could have satisfied my mom after what she went through. So it was a bit of a lonely childhood, I was quite isolated. Isolated and not isolated. Because I was a bit lonely at home, but I had good friends in the community."