Tag #138589 - Interview #78041 (otto simko)

Once the Gestapo and the Guardists burst into Jur. It was nighttime and we were all sleeping in barracks. They came with the words: "Schweine! Hunde! Ausstehen!" [in German: Swine! Dogs! Get up!]. It was at night, and we got up. They had a list, and took boys away to the transport. At the time I wasn't on their list. But it was a sign for me that I couldn't stay in Jur any more. So I left there and returned back home, to Nitra. By then I wasn't on the list there anymore, so this is how I got through that first danger of the transports. But then, there was this thing, that they took my father to jail, to Ilava! Not as a Jew, but as a social democrat! As a political prisoner to Ilava. The transported my mother, brother and me to a collection camp in Zilina, intending to send us to Auschwitz or to one of the other German concentration camps. But they transferred my father from Ilava, to Zilina as well. That was a horrible meeting! He didn't know that we were there. And when he saw us there, that was very moving both for him and for us. For two months I was in Zilina with my entire family. Then my mother's brother, Rezso, brought a fake baptism certificate. In it, it stood that my father had been converted before 1938, and on the basis of that our entire family went to the Vyhne camp. We were actually the first transport that went through that gate not into cattle cars, but into passenger trains, which then took us to Bzenice, which is the station before Vyhne. Vyhne doesn't have its own station. From there they took us on buses to the Vyhne labor camp. In Vyhne I worked in a bagmaking workshop, where I learned to make wallets, briefcases and similar things.

An interesting thing was when we came from the collection camp, from Zilina, to the Vyhne labor camp. The head of the Jewish camp had us line up, and said in German: "You were all converted before 1938." To this one voice: "Not me, not me!" Everyone stood in shock, wondering who was shouting that. It was a proletarian from Bratislava, Willy Kohn. A notorious Bratislava character. He also got into the Vyhne camp, but not because he'd been converted, but because he had an Aryan wife. Because they were also sending people from mixed marriages there. "I got Aryan wife! I got Aryan wife!" You see, Willy didn't speak Slovak well. He was a Presporker [Prespork, or Pressburg - the German name for Bratislava - Editor's note] and didn't speak Slovak. To that was this first funny incident, gallows humor.

Vyhne was known for having a boss, Gindl, who had this specialty, when someone did something, he got 25 on the whipping horse. He had a whipping horse set up there. A certain Guardist named Ondra used to give out 25 blows. He had this little boat and we called him the little brigadier. But Gindl was then let go, and Leitner arrived. He was a soldier, and he was much more decent. After his arrival the conditions in the camp got a bit better. We were in the Vyhne labor camp for ten months. Then my father got a departmental exception. Back then the minister of justice was a certain Fritz [Dr. Gejza Fritz]. He arranged for him to be employed in Trstena. He was responsible for the Grundbuch [in German: land register - Editor's note]. Polish towns that had fallen under the Slovak State needed to arrange some things in the land registry, and they put him there because of that. We were very glad to be able to leave.