return.’
By August, the Jewish population of Topol’čany had been literally decimated. Nine of Josef Büchler’s siblings had been deported with their families. Only 618 Jews of ‘importance for the economy’ remained. And they looked to the future with anxiety.3
Channa Markowicz In March 1939, Hungary had re-annexed Carpatho-Ukraine from Czechoslovakia,4 including Irshava, Channa Markowicz’s hometown. The first anti-Jewish laws were soon to follow.
The eyes of the occupiers were drawn particularly to Jews who, despite having lived in many cases for two or three generations in the Carpathian region – the mountainous area originally belonging to Czechoslovakia, now in Ukraine – had not become citizens or could not prove their citizenship. Jews who could not prove that their ancestors had lived there permanently before 1867 were especially endangered.5 This also applied to relatives of the Markowicz family who had immigrated from Poland.
By the end of August 1941, around 18,000 ‘foreign’ Jews, as they were called, had been deported by the Hungarian gendarmerie via eastern Galicia to Kamenez-Podolsk [Kam’yanets’ Podil’s’kyi] in Ukraine. Most of them were from the part of the Carpathians annexed by Hungary from Czechoslovakia in 1939. In Kamenez-Podolsk, 14,000 to 16,000 Jews deported from Hungary were murdered on 27 and 28 August 1941, together with several thousand Jews from the surrounding area. Apart from the SS and men from Police Battalion 320, members of the Ukrainian self-defence and a Hungarian pioneer unit took part. Altogether, 23,000 Jewish children, women and men perished on those two August days in 1941.6 ‘The first of our relatives were deported in 1942. At the time we thought it couldn’t get worse than it already was.’ They were wrong.
Eduard Kornfeld One day in Bratislava, came the order ‘All juveniles or all girls, I can’t remember which, have to register.’ The family didn’t know what to do. Was it going to get worse? Everyone was very afraid. There were rumours of deportation. No one knew where to. On 26 March 1942, the first transport with young Jewish women and girls from Slovakia reached Auschwitz extermination camp. Auschwitz Chronicle records: ‘999 Jewish women from Poprad in Slovakia are sent to the women’s section of Auschwitz. This is the first registered transport … The Jewish women get uniforms that belonged to the murdered Russian POWs.’7
The first eight Slovak transports to the East contained only young Jews – over 8,000 children and juveniles. This meant that, by the beginning of April 1942, most of the young Jews were no longer in Slovakia. From March to October 1942, around 58,000 Slovak Jews were deported, particularly to Auschwitz, Majdanek and Treblinka.8 Fewer than 300 were to return from the camps.9
Nazi Germany demanded RM 500 for each deportee for ‘retraining’. In return, it promised the Slovak government that no Jews would come back and that Germany would not assert any further claims to their assets.10
The Kornfelds had decided in early 1942 to flee to Hungary. They didn’t want to wait until it was their turn: ‘In Hungary, my parents believed, it was still relatively safe for us Jews.’ Eduard’s 15-year-old brother Heinrich and his 11-year-old sister Mathilde were to be transported over the border by a smuggler, a farmer. The other members of the family intended to follow a few days later. On 7 May 1942, they were ready. Shortly before they were to leave, Simon and Rosa Kornfeld decided that it was better for the girl Mathilde to remain with them. ‘Eduard, you should go with Heinrich.’
‘So I put on one suit and another one on top of it. That’s all. My father blessed us and promised that they would soon follow. No one expected that we would never see each other again. It was a farewell for ever.’
The farmer collected them from their home. ‘My father paid the man. Outside the town, there was a horse-drawn cart.’ This would take them to Vel’ký Meder, which had been annexed by Hungary along with the entire south of Slovakia.11 Eduard’s grandfather and one of his uncles lived there. Eduard and Heinrich were to stay there a few days and then make their way to Budapest. The farmer hurried them along. They had to cross the border before it got light.
‘We followed the railway line in the direction of Vel’ký Meder. From time to time, we placed our ears to the tracks to hear whether a train was coming.’ When it got light, the farmer left them. He said: ‘It’s too dangerous for me now. Just keep going straight on. You’ll come to a village soon. Take the train from there to Vel’ký Meder.’ They had arranged with their father that they would give the farmer a note as a sign when they arrived at their destination. Before the departure, their father had given them a piece of paper torn into two unequal halves and given one half to Eduard’s brother Heinrich. He had kept the other half himself.
If my father was given the piece of paper intact by the farmer, he would know that we had arrived safely in Vel’ký Meder and the man would get the rest of his money.
As the farmer had not brought us to the agreed destination, my brother ripped off a small piece. I don’t know if my mother and father understood the sign. Unfortunately, I never saw them again.
They reached the village between 5 and 6 a.m. An old peasant woman asked the boys: ‘Are you Slovak Jews?’
‘No! No! We’re not from Slovakia!’
‘Listen, I’m a Jew. You don’t need to be afraid. I will just warn you that your Shabbat suits tell everyone right away that you’re not from here. Come with me.’ The woman took the boys home with her. ‘First of all, we gulped down water like crazy.’ They were given something to eat and then slept for a few hours. So that they wouldn’t draw attention to themselves, the woman had advised them to take the train to Vel’ký Meder in the evening. ‘There are so many people, including farmers from other villages. We were simply to mingle with them all.’
The train journey to Vel’ký Meder was without incident. They went to their grandfather’s house. He lived there with their youngest uncle, his wife and their six children aged between 1 and 7 years. The brothers couldn’t stay there because they would all have had to remain in hiding. ‘We were in the country illegally. And besides we were meant to take the train to Budapest, where our parents and sister were to come.’ They took the train to Budapest. Their father’s uncle lived there. Eduard and Heinrich lived with him for the first few weeks. ‘He was very helpful and did his best, like a replacement father.’ But the family was very poor and had lots of children. Besides, ‘his wife didn’t want to hide us’. She was terrified that the boys would be discovered during a raid.
‘We waited impatiently for our parents and sister to arrive. For weeks, even months, we heard nothing from them. We became increasingly worried as the days went by. It was unbearable.’
The brothers were living in terrible conditions. As his own family all lived in a very small apartment, their uncle had rented a room for them with a non-Jewish family. ‘The room had no windows, with just a small opening onto the kitchen. It was so small that there was only space for one bed, no chairs or a table. When we switched on the light, everything was covered in red bugs. They had a very painful bite.’ During the day, Eduard and Heinrich stayed out of the room. As ‘illegals’, they lived in constant fear of a raid. They had told the landlord that they attended ‘some school or other’ in Budapest. They promised repeatedly to register soon with the authorities.
They normally hid in the morning in one of the numerous synagogues in Budapest among the Talmud students there. ‘No one took any notice of us.’
So they wouldn’t starve, they had to think up some scheme every day. Sometimes they bought poppyseed cake, which they couldn’t actually afford. There were many other things Eduard and Heinrich couldn’t have bought either, even if they had had the money, because they needed ration
