“Daddy was left with a photograph which he kept in a cabinet, few notebooks, and one book that I still have. It is Grimm’s Fairy Tales in paperback with written note from Evička in German - my dearest fairy tales. She was a little girl who spoke Slovak, Hungarian, German and Hebrew.”
“Mom jumped out of the lorry and by the river Nitra, in the water, she got back to where they were hiding. It was the St. Nicolas Day. There she found out, where my sister was moved to and they were hiding together until the end of the war. Because of my mom’s action, her husband was so harshly beaten that he didn’t survive till the next day. So it can be said with certainty that the Hlinka Guard was responsible for the death of my sister’s dad”.
“I often use one harsh sentence. Somehow I live with such feeling that the only reason I am here is because others are not. It's not that I recall it every day, but I think about it very often.”
Zuzana Sternová was born in 1947 in Nitra. Both of her parents lost their partners during the Holocaust and got married after the war. With the bitterness in her voice she says that she lives because others don’t. Zuzana’s mother together with her first husband and her stepsister were hiding at various families. Later, the Hlinka Guard found them, however, her sister Vierka wasn’t caught. They were transported by the lorry, from which her mother jumped out with the tragic consequences for her husband, who was beaten to death. Zuzana’s father survived thanks to family’s late transport to concentration camp in 1945. He worked in a forced labour camp somewhere in Poland. Zuzana Sternová is often being labelled as the first lady of Slovak Architecture. She is one of the first designers working on projects using thermal insulation cladding for apartment buildings.
