Child Survivor

Michalovce, Czechoslovakia; Novaky Labor Camp, Slovakia; Berlin, Germany

Hedy Judokovic Duschinsky was born in Michalovce, Czechoslovakia on January 21, 1927, to Mark and Malvina Riederman Judikovic. Mark had two daughters from his first marriage, Clara (Clara Keller) and Lilly (Lillian Kander), and he and Malvina had four children, Dezikee (Ducu), Mikulas (Mike), Hedy (Hedy Duschinsky), and Lola (Lola Schoenberger).

“I had a very happy life. My father’s business was in Prague, Czech Republic. And he came home every Friday and Monday morning he went back to his job. He was delivering meat for Czechoslovakia…. We had a big house. There were three bedrooms, a kitchen, and a big summer kitchen 4-5 meters from the house…. I went to school regularly when I was not even six years old. I wasn’t ready, very young. I always ran out because I didn’t want to learn…. I also had a private tutor for Hebrew…. For the summer, we went to the village where Clara lived with her husband and children.”

They did not feel any antisemitism and were very close with the neighbors. “Hitler started in Germany in 1938, and it was very bad for the Jews. In 1939, we were expelled from school right away and the Jewish community established a school for the Jewish children from the village.

“In 1942, they started to take boys and girls, 16-45, to go to work for Germany. My brother Ducu. Dezikee, was 18 years old. He was in gymnasium, and they took him because he was a Jew. On his 18th birthday, in the middle of the night, they took him to jail. Then he was two or three months in Auschwitz, and he was killed.

“The Slovaks also took fifty Jews, including my father, to jail that day. In the basement of a post office, they put them because the jails were full. After a few weeks they let my father out because they found the people who killed some German soldiers and then they let them go. Otherwise, they were ready to shoot them. That was the very beginning.

“Next, we had all kinds of restrictions. We couldn’t go to a movie. We had to wear the yellow star. And after 6:00, we couldn’t go out of the house. We always had two domestic helpers and we couldn’t have them anymore. My mother was sick. She had kidney disease and had surgery in Prague. So, she taught me how to cook and how to bake. I was thirteen and I baked our own bread and challah and cake for Shabbos.

“In 1942, 90% of the Jews were taken to concentration camp to Poland…. My father bribed some police and he paid constantly so we stayed in our house for two more years. He couldn’t go to Prague anymore because the Germans were there. In Slovakia, President Tito started to do what Hitler did. And Slovakia was the only country that paid five hundred marks for every Jew, for Hitler to take the Jews.

“I was on gentile papers from the black market. For a while, they needed my father, and he delivered meat to Bratislava, the capital city of Slovakia. And so, for a few months because daddy had papers, he could stay in the country…. Meanwhile, my brother, Mike, so they wouldn’t take him to the concentration camp, was hiding in the forest from 1942, 1943, and that’s how he got saved in the underground…. My sister Lilly was in America. And Clara was in a village with three little children, and they were taken to Auschwitz in 1942 and died there.

“In 1943, they said that again they would take the rest of the Jews, so father arranged to smuggle us to relatives in Uzghorod, Hungary. If they caught somebody on the border they shot them. So, we were supposed to go one by one.”

Lola recalls her escape: “I was the youngest. So, big snow, January or February, my father hired somebody for money and with our next-door neighbor, a 12-year-old girl, in the middle of the night in the snow, crawling on our stomachs through the border, we went to Hungary. The woman who took us through the border took us by train to the relatives. When the Hungarian police asked for papers, she says, ‘Ah, those are my two nieces. They’re sleeping. Leave them alone. The school didn’t have enough coal, so they came to my house for vacation, and I am taking them home.’ So, they let us be. When we came at three in the morning to our relatives and I threw some stones at the window, they got all excited because they were afraid that they would be put in jail if they saved us. So, we stayed there two or three days, and my cousin took us to Budapest. There was a camp, Polish and German and Slovak refugees were in this camp that the Jewish community organized. After four weeks, they let me out and my mother came, and I wasn’t allowed to say that was my mother. So, we just looked at each other. I went this way and, she went that way. Never saw her again in my life.

Hedy was supposed to be the next one to go to Hungary with her father. “Meantime, the Germans took over Hungary. So, my father said no because one of my cousins with a seven-year-old boy was killed on the border…. I had Christian paper and letters, saying I was a Gentile. Everything was bought with money. My name was Russian, Masha Mitikova, and I am from Russia. Also, my father had Christian papers. Two days before we were leaving, the gendarmes came to the house… My father was hiding and just the two of us were home.

“In 1944, a Christian neighbor, Andrew Pratko, took us in and hid us in the cellar, where we lay on potato sacks. They built that house by themselves, and they have in their kitchen a square cut out to go in the basement, it was like a ladder to go in. When we came, they put a piece of furniture on the top of it. They had two children and even the children didn’t know that somebody was there because at midnight they took us out through the ladder for a little air…. Then we went to another town, and we were like two Christians. My father lived in a room by a lady. And he went on the street, and they saw him. They stopped him and wanted the papers, so he showed he was Christian. No, he didn’t look Christian. So, they took him behind a gate. And they naturally undo his slacks and they saw that he was a Jew. And they took him in October on the last transport that went to the gas chambers at Auschwitz. How we found out was because somebody was there, and he told us my father was burned.

“I was still on the Christian paper. They got me to Novaky, a labor camp in central Slovakia, for a short time because January was the end of the war. My high school principal saw me on the street and recognized that I am Jewish. He went to the police and said that’s a Jewish girl.”

After the war, Lola was the first one who came home to Michalovce from concentration camp. Hedy stayed on the west side in Slovakia. “I couldn’t go home because the trains were not going. I came a week later. Our brother Mike was home already too. Our house was in shambles. It looked terrible. Russian soldiers burned the beautiful parquet floors…. All the Holocaust survivors got together, and nobody wanted to live in the same city with the Slovaks. So, we went to Liberec in the Czech Republic and there we started a new home. We had a lot of help from the Jewish community and slowly we got established. And then first thing we registered with the American Consulate to go out from Czechoslovakia to the United States. But everybody wanted to go so it wasn’t easy.

Then the Communists took over and Lola and her husband, Igor Schoenberger, left illegally to Germany. And went from Germany to France and waited for three years to leave.

Hedy was engaged to be married to Joseph Duschinsky. “We stayed because I was sick with arthritis. They took me to Prague to a sanatorium because I wasn’t able to walk, just crawl. I went to a very famous professor, and he put me in a whole-body cast for six months. And then they put me in a brace so that I could start to walk.

“And then Russia came to Czechoslovakia and again the same story. They were against Jews. My sister Lilly was in America, and I had cousins there. They sent streptomycin and that’s what helped me to take off everything and walk…. Then in the middle of the night with my husband, we took a lot of money and two bags and crossed the border and escaped to Berlin, Germany, where we could make an affidavit that we won’t be a burden to the United States. We were there a year and a half and then we went to Canada for three years. My daughter (Eva Marcia Ash) was born. And then I had two more children (Stanley Mark and Carrie).”

Hedy has seven grandchildren and five great-grandchildren. She wants them to know “that I love them. That’s my life. When they come and they hug me and kiss me and sing for me. And how happy I am that I have them.”

 

Date of Interview: March 18, 2024 Schoenberger
Length of Interview: 61minutes
Interview & Synopsis by: Zieva Konvisser
Videographer: Mark Einhaus
Additional Comments: Sister, Lola Judikovic