Lydia Sternová

“We had a printing shop selling notebooks, pens, pencil cases and other utensils for school and office. Our “Aryanizer”, who had been an apprentice of my father, needed my mother to help him in the shop, because he wasn’t that much skilful. We lived in the house of president Tiso’s parents. He was born in Bytčec and they had a house there. Tiso’s mother knew my mother and liked her very much. They were peasants and very nice people, not like their son (laughing). I still remember her telling my mother, that she was afraid that her son would be killed one day. That’s what they did after the war, they hanged him. She begged her son to send my mother a “white ID card”. They were giving these to Jewish citizens that were indispensable for the Slovak national economy. In this way we were able to save ourselves for a couple of months. But my mother was helping to hide one of our friends. This was uncovered and we were sent to Sered. But we were lucky because the Jewish community gave Tiso a lot of money in order to prevent the transports from rolling to the concentration camps.”

“We didn’t have a lot of information about each other. Everybody had just a certain connection to the next one. There were people who were illegally transferring people across the border but I can’t tell you exactly where. We were just searching for people who wanted to emigrate to Israel and we tried to help each other. A lot of them left. I didn’t know many of the names included in the indictment. We were in touch with Samuel Veselý, as far as I knew. I don’t know what my husband knew. We were trying to guide them across the border. Eventually, they caught that family. They had a little child and they forgot to give him some kind of pill to make it sleep, so it started to cry at the frontier and they caught them.”

“We started to help people flee to Israel. This was, of course, a very risky undertaking under the Communists. One family that was caught in the attempt to illegally cross the border revealed our network. After they got caught they told the StB everything. It was a family with two kids. Their family name was Kalininovi. The StB arrested 12 people - including me - and they expelled the Israeli ambassador from the country. At first I spent about a month or two in Litoměřice, then they transferred me to Pankrác prison. I was held in custody for nine months – that violates all international conventions – but the Communists obviously didn’t care about it. I suffered a lot. I was interrogated and beaten frequently. From that time on I’m deaf on my left ear because they broke my eardrum. My dear husband embroiled me in it even more, because he was jealous, or wasn’t he? I don’t know. I was sentenced to four years and sat out two and a half. I was released when Gottwald and Stalin died.”