We took it to mean that this is the time and we have to deal with it
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Juraj Steiner was born on May 26, 1936 in the district town, Zlaté Moravce, located in the Dolná Nitra region, into a Jewish family. He spent his early childhood surrounded by his parents and grandmother, with whom they ran a book, paper, glass and porcelain store. After the declaration of the Slovak state in 1939, he and his family were persecuted because of their Jewish origin. As a result of the adoption of a series of anti-Jewish laws in 1942, Juraj’s family lost their livelihood – the family general store, and with it their home. Subsequently, Juraj’s father was interned in a labor camp in Nováky, from where he was deported to a concentration camp in Lublin, where he died of typhus. In an attempt to avoid transportation, Juraj and his mother and grandmother fled from Zlaté Moravce to Hungary. Witness and his mother finally survived the first and second wave of deportation of Slovak Jews in Budapest, where they adopted a new identity. After the arrival of the Arrow Cross party, which established terror in the country, Juraj’s mother was taken to the women’s concentration camp in Ravensbrück. Juraj thus survived the last months of the war in substitute custody behind the walls of the Budapest ghetto. After the liberation, the family returned to Zlaté Moravce, where they began to devote themselves to the restoration of the family business. It disappeared after the start of the nationalization of private enterprises. In the years 1952 – 1956, Juraj completed his studies at the Secondary Industrial School in Komárno, where he learned a trade. After completing his mandatory military service at the air force unit in Hradec Králové, he started working at the Komárno Slovak Shipyard plant, where he gradually worked his way up to head of department. He later supplemented his professional education with distance studies at the Faculty of Engineering of STU in Bratislava. He currently lives in retirement in Komárno.
