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Jana Fraňková
Jana Fraňková was born in Prague just after WWII in 1946. Her Slovak-Jewish mother had been in hiding in southern Bohemia during the War, and her cousin (who lived with Jana and her mother) had spent two years in Ravensbrück concentration camp. Jana…
Jana Fiserova-Dadik
Jana Fiserova-Dadik was born in Prague in 1925. She was raised with her three siblings in the Smíchov district of the city, where her parents, Rudolph and Barbora, owned a restaurant. Jana speaks fondly of her childhood in and around the business;…
Jan Pala
Jan Pala was born in Bratislava in 1952. His mother, Paulina, worked as a salesperson, while his father (also called Ján) worked as a clerk in Bratislava’s Carlton Hotel. Jan was the second of three sons – his younger brother, Lubomir, immigrated to…
Jan Kocvara
Jan Kocvara was born in 1946 in Trnava, Slovakia. His father (also called Ján) was a tailor who published a book on tailoring and taught at an apprentice school. After the Communist coup, he was forced to stop teaching and writing and began making…
Ján Gadzo
Ján Gadzo was born in Strážske, a small town in Eastern Slovakia, in 1949. Ján says that his family owned a successful farm and that they were one of the wealthiest families in town. When the farmland in his area was being collectivized, he remembers…
Helena Stossel
Helena Stossel was born in Prague in 1946. Helena’s parents both worked at a small silk-screening operation – her father as the manager and her mother as a silk-screener. Helena and her younger brother, Tomas, were watched by her grandmother and…
George Mesko
George Mesko was born in Košice in March 1928. His father worked as a senior official on the Košice-Bohumín Railway, while his mother stayed at home and looked after George and his older sisters. With the signing of the First Vienna Arbitration in…
George Grosman
George Grosman was born in Prague in 1953. During WWII, his father, Ladislav, was drafted into the Slovak army and then sent to a forced labor camp because he was Jewish. His mother, Edith, who was also Jewish, spent most of the War in Auschwitz.…
Gabriel Levicky
Gabriel Levicky was born in Humenné, eastern Slovakia, in 1948. His parents, Hungarian-speaking Slovak Jews, both survived concentration camps during WWII; his mother was in Auschwitz and his father in Sachsenhausen. Gabriel says that they were not…
Frank Safertal
Frank Safertal was born in the Holešovice district of Prague in 1942. His father, also named František, had been arrested shortly before Frank’s birth because of his participation in an underground resistance group. Frank’s father was sent to a labor…