Eva Selucká

“An awful amount of fleas and dirt, and when they wanted to eat something, they had to have it delivered to them and to pay a ton for it. It was dreadful. My mother came down with dysentery. One relative of ours lived there, she was originally from Bratislava. She lived there with her relatives from the other side. She started sorting things out for Mum to be sent to hospital. And Dad. Mum managed to phone to Bratislava that he shouldn’t go home. We had some friends, the husband was an official at the railways, the Bratislava roundhouse, Mr Háka, and his wife was an old friend of Mum’s. They lived near the train station, and whenever anyone went home, they’d stop by the Hákas. Mum phoned that he shouldn’t go home. So he slept over at their place, and the next day he found out what had happened, so he started sorting it out.”

“There was some children’s doctor from Prague, which was a mistake. We had furunculosis and boils, and the poor woman had never cut up dead bodies or anything before, so she didn’t trust herself much, so it was difficult for her to make a proper cut. I got it too, I had boils, but more importantly, I had leg pains. I’d hurt myself, and the duralumin was somehow toxic, and I got an infection. It ate up my leg over here, right up to the bone. I had an actual hole there. One time, when the doctor was treating me, there was an air raid, I had to sit in the sick bay, it hurt me awfully, I was crying like anything, and so she let me stay in the sick bay for a week. I had a young body, which endured, and [the wound] began to close up. It closed up later on in the train...”

“Girls and boys first. Single, roughly from sixteen to thirty-five. Their parents reckoned, well, they’ll be working, so they packed them a backpack like they were going on a summer camp. Something like that. They added in warm clothes. Those were the first transports, that was toward the end of March 1942; more followed, this time they took whole families. There were a lot of Jews in eastern Slovakia, and they formed a camp in Žilina...”