Righteous Among the Nations: Israel honored twelve people from Slovakia
The awardees saved a total of twenty people.
BRATISLAVA. They survived bombing, long wanderings without a roof over their heads, fighting in the ranks of partisans and labor camps.
After a two-year break due to the pandemic, Israel published six more stories of how twelve people from Slovakia saved the lives of twenty-two Jews, including ten children.
“They acted in defiance of the regime, risking real life and the safety of their families to save innocent Jewish men, women and children,” said Israeli Ambassador Eitan Levon.
“We greatly honor their bravery and sense of humanity, and while reading these six stories, we ask ourselves how we would behave in the same circumstances.”
Antónia Nikodemová, Anton and Oľga Balážovci, Oliver Rácz, Ján and Anna Makónyovci, Pavel Petroch, Ján and Mária Bukovci, Jozef Fekiač, Ján and Mária Spevákovci received the Righteous Among the Nations award on Monday. Their names will be carved into the Wall of Honor in the Garden of the Righteous in the grounds of the Yad Vashem memorial in Jerusalem.
They joined the other 590 people from Slovakia who received this award for saving Jews during the Second World War.
Antonia Nikodemová
Daisy Hannah Adriana Judita Leier comes from a wealthy family that had a sugar factory in Nitra. One day during the war, they took Daisy’s parents to their lawyer’s office, gave her fake documents, money and left her there. That was the last Daisy saw of them.
Since then, cook Antónia Nikodemová took care of her. She and Daisy traveled by train to the village of Solčany, where Tonka’s mother lived, who sheltered them in her house.
Life in the village was difficult for Daisy. Right next door to our neighbor lived a boy who called her “dirty Jewess” and chased her around the garden.
She also wore a large cross around her neck and had to go to church every Sunday. He remembers a man standing outside the church with a drum announcing that anyone hiding Jews would be killed along with them if discovered.
One night, Tonka took Daisy on a 60 kilometer long march through the fields to Šoporno. Daisy was still small then, and when she could no longer walk, Tonka carried her on her back. Along the way, they slept in heaps of dreams.
After a long journey, they came to Tonka’s friends, a couple with six children, where they spent the rest of the war. After the war, Aunt Rozi took her to Hungary, where she lived for several years before moving to Canada.
Anton and Olga Balážovci
Pavel David Sivor was born as Pavel Suchostaver in July 1934 in Bratislava. At the age of nine, he and his family had to move out of their apartment in Bratislava because a Slovak arizator was staying there.
They lived for a while with the Belarusian refugee Birjukov, and later they hid with David’s grandmother Ružena in Podunajské Biskupice with the Ozvalds, where other members of David’s family were hiding.
After revealing the hiding place with the Ozvalds, Dávid’s uncles and cousin were deported to concentration camps. Dávid’s mother previously managed to get old Ružena to hide in a hospital in Bratislava, Dávid hid from the guards in a barn.
His parents then found a new shelter for him. They were helped in this by their friends, Anton and Oľga Balážovci, who hid him in the summer of 1944 in Veľké Leváry in the house of Anton’s mother, Anna Balážová.
At the time, Dávid’s mother was working under a false name in the hospital of the Elizabethan order, until a colleague betrayed her. Grandma Ružena was also caught and both were deported to Terezín.
Dávid then lived in Mrs. Balážová’s house and spent his time in fear in the yard digging holes so that I could hide if necessary.
After the outbreak of the SNP, the Baláž family found Dávid a new hiding place, where he stayed until the end of the war.
Dávid’s mother, Terezín, survived and returned for her son, with whom she then went to live in Israel.
Oliver Rácz
Vilém Ganz grew up in Košice and in 1940 he was taken to forced labor, where he spent two and a half years. When the hunt for Jews began, his well-known acquaintance Oliver Rácz helped him.
Rácz worked in the labor camp administration, where he had access to certificates and stamps. He gave William the certificate of a Christian Hungarian soldier, he also gave him a Hungarian military uniform and got him to Budapest.
Thanks to this, Ganz was able to join the Jewish resistance movement. After the war, he studied medicine and together with his wife emigrated to the USA.
Similarly, Rácz also helped Štefan Šimko, who was also born in Košice, but worked as a doctor in Budapest during the war. When he too was threatened with deportation, Rácz gave him the papers of a Hungarian soldier who fell in Ukraine, as well as the corresponding uniform.
Štefan boarded a train to Budapest and joined the Yugoslav partisans led by Tito. After the war, he and his wife settled in Košice and continued to work as a doctor.
Thanks to false documents, Rácz also saved Katalin Nyiszliová from Košice from deportation. He put her on a train to Budapest, where she worked under a false identity as a seamstress in a factory until the Soviets liberated the city.
After the war, she returned to her native Košice, where she married her savior, Oliver Rácz.
Ján Makóny and Anna Makónyová
The brothers Gejza and Vojtech Schultz were engineers and thanks to that they avoided labor camps. They were assigned to a paramilitary unit called the “sixth battalion”, which did auxiliary work for the Slovak army.
Later, Vojtech worked as a military construction supervisor on the construction of Tri duby airport and as a construction manager in Garansek (today’s Hronsek) near Banská Bystrica.
Despite his expertise, on October 30, 1944, along with dozens of other Jews, he found himself on the list of unnecessary employees. That’s why he fled to the mountains around Pršian, where he tried to join the partisans.
When he failed to establish contact with them, he went to Garansek and sought help from the Makóny couple who lived there. Until liberation, they hid Vojtech, his brother Gejza and Gejza’s wife Alžbeta with hay and in a grain warehouse, and provided them with food, thus saving their lives.
Gejza emigrated to Israel after the war, Vojtech moved to Košice.
Pavel Petroch, Bukovci and Jozef Fekiač
As head of the dairy farm, Arpád Eckstein was granted an exemption as an “economically important Jew”, which also allowed his family in Krupin to avoid deportation. After the outbreak of the Uprising, the city was part of the insurgent territory.
On October 18, 1944, word spread at the fair that the Germans were approaching with the Hlinka Guard, and panic set in. The Eckstein family also fled in a hurry, wandering around without shelter for several days until they reached Lithuania, where they asked Jozef Fekiač for help.
He could not shelter a family of five for a long time, so Eckstein turned to the family of Ján Bukov from Čeloviece, whom he knew from fairs. The Bukov family hid the family in their house on the slopes until the end of the war.
They were also helped by Bukov’s friend Pavol Petroch, whose family sends warm clothes, food and cakes to the Jews in hiding.
A friendship arose between the Eckstein, Petroch and Bukov families, which lasted even after the end of the war, as well as another difficult period, when all three families were persecuted by the communist regime as “kulaks”, i.e. hostile elements.
Ján Spevák and Mária Speváková
The Klein family in Revúca also received an exemption that saved them from deportation in 1942. At the time of the Slovak National Uprising, Revúca was no longer a safe place for Jews, so the Kleins decided to go to Banská Bystrica.
When the Nazi troops approached the city, almost the entire rest of Slovak Jewry lived there. It was about ten thousand people. Many of them had prepared shelters in the hills, but were reluctant to take the large Klein family, two adults and six children. They were afraid that small children would cry and reveal the hiding place in the forest.
Rabbi Avraham Wintner from Sečoviec helped the Kleins in their desperation, who arranged for them a small apartment in the village of Riečka, which belonged to Mrs. Spišiaková. The family there officially pretended to be Evangelicals, but the villagers knew that they were Jews. At night, they carried the family to the doorstep of food.
When the Germans captured Banská Bystrica, they started searching for Jews in and around the town with the Hlinkov Guards. That is why Mrs. Spišiaková asked the Kleins to leave the house immediately. The desperate family went from house to house until the Spevák family helped them.
She provided them with a small, unheated room where the Kleins’ three youngest children slept in strollers and the three older ones slept with their parents on straw mats on the floor. When the family ran out of money and sold their clothes, Ms. Speváková collected money from people in nearby Tajov to “help refugees”.
The Klein family stayed with the Spevák family until the day the village was liberated by the Romanian army. They then moved to the United States.