This picture is from 1941 or 1942, it was taken in the Svaty Jur labor camp, into which I was drafted on 3rd October 1941. I'm the young man with glasses on the left, in the right part of the photograph is my friend Rafael Friedl, a musically and linguistically talented boy, who was a fervent Zionist. He managed to escape, and lived to see the liberation in a small Slovak town as the organist of a local Catholic church. Many years later I met him in Prague, where he was working as a diplomat for the state of Israel under the Hebrew name of Rafael ben Shalom. He asked me whether I wouldn't like to work for Simon Wiesenthal as a 'Nazi hunter.' But I declined the offer. I wanted to start a new life. I wanted to forget all of those horrors. Of course, it's impossible to forget. Maybe forgive, but it's definitely impossible to forget.
Ladislav Porjes and Rafael Friedl
The Centropa Collection at USHMM
The Centropa archive has been acquired by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. USHMM will soon offer a Special Collections page for Centropa.
Academics please note: USHMM can provide you with original language word-for-word transcripts and high resolution photographs. All publications should be credited: "From the Centropa Collection at the United States Memorial Museum in Washington, DC".
Please contact collection [at] centropa.org (collection[at]centropa[dot]org).