Tag #137964 - Interview #78790 (Alexander Bachnar)

My sister Ela was also with me in the labor camp in Novaky. She was the head of a sewing workshop in the camp. There were around two hundred women working in that workshop. My sister, as an excellent seamstress, was the manager. Aside from other things, she also made clothes for the camp commander's wife, Mrs. Polhorova. When in 1942 the last transport was supposed to leave Novaky, the so-called Yom Kippur transport, which consisted of four hundred Jews, I was also on the list among the four hundred. We were already assembled, ready to leave for the Novaky train station, for deportation, when my sister found out that I was on it. She went to see Mrs. Polhorova and pleaded with her to intervene with her husband, the camp commander. And so it happened that Polhora crossed my name off the list and wrote someone else's instead. Someone else died instead of me. I didn't find out about it until 25 years after the war ended. My sister didn't want to tell me, so that I wouldn't have to live with the trauma that someone else saved my life. Well, and so I basically stayed alive. Because that transport was immediately wiped out after arriving at the Lublin concentration camp.

From Novaky we went into the uprising. We knew that it was going to happen eventually. We had a Communist cell in the camp and basically we prepared for it. We looked for weapons, bought weapons from Slovak soldiers. A secret fund was created, from which we used to buy the weapons. Money for weapons also came from the Jewish Center in Bratislava [17]. At night we would practice using the weapons. We had I don't know how many dozens of pistols, several rifles, we even had two mortars, of which one didn't work.