In May of 1945, my mother returned to her hometown of Humenne in Eastern Slovakia. She weighed about a hundred pounds, had lost many teeth and walked with a heavy limp caused by bone tuberculosis. She had been imprisoned in Auschwitz, starting in March of 1942. In early 1945, along with her “lagerschwester” (“camp sister”) Elsa, she managed to slip away from the March of Death and walked across mountain passes and through thick forests back to Humenne. If the odds of survival in the camp were 10,000:1, the odds of successfully breaking away from the Death March and making it home were 10 times worse. She was 21 years old when she returned.
My father also got back home safely. He had spent the war in hiding, living on fake papers, hiding in barns and haystacks, saved first by the good-hearted, devoutly Catholic farmer Vince and his wife. They risked their lives for months on end hiding my father and his companions on their farm. If caught, father would have been shipped to Auschwitz but Vince and his wife would have been summarily shot in the back of the head right there, in the middle of a wild yellow mustard field. His other saviors arrived in the form of Red Army advanced units. Dad fought alongside them until the last remnants of the SS and the Wermacht were gone. His Russian saviors were not sweet and good-hearted like Vince. They drank vodka, smoked hand rolled “machorka” cigarettes, raped and pillaged and fought the Germans with a blazing, vicious hate. Because what we call World War Two, the Russians call The Great Patriotic War. The Germans had occupied and raped their land, Mother Russia, and when the tide had turned and the Germans were retreating, they could expect zero mercy. They got less than zero. My father told me the Russian captain he served under would have been happy to erase every last German man, woman and child from the face of the earth.
My parents had known each other before the war but did not socialize. I believe my father had eyes for mom’s older sister Lea who did not make it out of Auschwitz. Edith, my mother, was two years younger then Lea, and now she was skeletal, with bad teeth and tufts of hair falling out. Nevertheless, her brown eyes sparkled and she could give as good as she could take, answering each barb and friendly tease with one of her own. They walked back from the train station and my grandma said: “Laco, won’t you stay for a bowl of soup?” (my dad’s name was Ladislav in Slovak, Laszlo in Hungarian, shortened to Laco or Laci) And the rest, as they say, was history.
My parents knew that if they were to stay in Czechoslovakia, they had to move to Prague, 450 miles west of Humenne. For a young couple from Humenne, Prague could have just as well been Paris or London. It was far and exciting and exotic - but it was the capital city of their country Czechoslovakia and if you didn’t emigrate to America or Canada or Israel, that’s where you went searching for your fame and fortune.
All of my parents’ friends were Holocaust survivors, to a man and woman they each had a tattoo on their forearm. My mother’s tattoo number was 1970 and when I was a little kid, I always thought that come 1970, her tattoo would magically vanish. Some of these people had lost everything and everybody in Hitler’s diabolical human slaughterhouses: they had lost spouses, mothers, fathers, and in many cases little children. Some had witnessed their wives and babies whipped by Ukrainian “kapos” as they were marched to the gas chambers, children screaming in confusion and horror and mothers trying to soothe them, even as they were being herded to their own death in the Zyklon B “showers” of Treblinka, Majdanek and, of course, Auschwitz/Birkenau. They had witnessed horrors that we cannot imagine. We think we can - but we can’t. No Steven Spielberg movie, edges softened by Hollywood producers’ demands, can come close to conveying the horror. And yet: these horrors, while being the defining moments of their youth, did not stop them from building new lives, marrying new wives, having new children, living lives as fulfilling as they could under the Communist regime of Stalinist Czechoslovakia. I remember our tiny apartment in Prague 12 (later Prague 3) full of loud chatter, book and movie talk, political talk (the volume decreased sharply), cheap cigarette smoke and endless cups of Turkish coffee to wash down mom’s delectable cakes and pastries. She would have been up at 5 am, in line for milk, then for bread, then for potatoes, but miraculously we ate well and she always found the time to bake pastries and cookies. All these people whose lives were unbearably tragic still managed to make life fun. Fun and hard work, and humor blacker than the Turkish coffee they favored.
Sadly, that generation is now gone. My mom was the last of the Mohicans, dying in 2020 at the age of 96. My father passed away at 60 from a massive coronary, after a life of chain-smoking cheap cigarettes, downing bottomless cups of coffee and wolfing down rye bread “schmeared” with goose fat. And then there were the endless hours hunched over his typewriter, as he became one of the most successful Czechoslovak authors in the 1960’s.
As if Hitler and Stalin had not been enough, we had to flee the country in 1968 but that’s a different story for another day - a story I have already written about quite a bit. My point is simple: those folks, those Jewish men and women born between 1919 and 1929 were made of tough stuff. Their will to survive, to live, to prosper and to succeed, to bring into the world a new generation and new hope was forged harder than any steel. We don’t have such people around today. May god bless the souls of my parents and all their hero friends who achieved the impossible: they defeated Hitler!
Thank you for sharing. Deeply moving. And I've heard endless stories like that, but it always gets me. And yes, the "never again" was quickly forgotten by the current generation of sissies and bed wetters who shit their pants over the flu. Have no idea why we fought world war 2.
💔 Keep teaching us history Mr. Grosman. Perhaps we will not repeat it.