Ela Stankova and Jewish girls from Topolcany

In this photograph, my sister Ela (Stankova, nee Bachnerova) is in the top row, first on the left. The photo was taken in Topolcany in the 1930s by the photographer Aladar Vermes. Ela was a seamstress and managed to survive the Holocaust. She survived thanks to the fact that she was the head of a sewing workshop in the Novaky labor camp. After the suppression of the Slovak National Uprising she hid out using forged papers in a town not far from Banska Bystrica.