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My grandmother, Hannah Abramova, had three children according to the documents – Yasha, Moisey and my mother. I knew Moisey Borovik. He was a furrier. His wife was from a wealthy Jewish family. When the war began, they were transported to a transit camp and he never saw his wife again. He went through many camps. He didn’t like to talk about his experiences. When the first film about Auschwitz was shown, he didn’t want to see it, but eventually he went to see it. He came back and said, ‘What they showed there was paradise. But to us, it was horrible.’ Uncle Moisey was an educated man, or more precisely, a self-educated man. My mother’s other brother, Yasha, went to try his luck in Brazil.

We had several pieces of information about my father, but they differed. There were also three versions of his death. The first said that he was working in that 'Sonderkommando' [commando responsible for carrying the dead out of the gas chambers and their cremation] in Auschwitz, where he was burning corpses, and that after three months they killed him as well. The second version was also that he'd been in Auschwitz, but that when the Russians were already approaching, the Germans drove them out on a death march, and he wasn't able to handle it and died during its course. The third version said that my father had asked some SS soldier for water, who saw that my father had gold teeth. He told him to give him the gold teeth and he'd give him water. My father didn't give them to him, and so he killed him. So that's it. I don't know which version is the truth. Maybe the truth is somewhere in between.

Nálunk ez nem volt, mert nem volt a családban orvos, egyetemi professzor vagy ilyesmi. [Természetesen a zsidótörvények a zsidó vállalkozókat is érintették, mert a második zsidótörvény értelmében nem adtak ki új iparengedélyeket, és sokaktól vissza is vonták engedélyüket, amit egy darabig az úgynevezett stróman rendszerrel lehetett kijátszani. – A szerk.] Az üzletet becsukták, lepecsételték és a többi.

My maternal grandfather was Isidor or Israel Borovik. He died around 1924. He was from Vilnius [capital of Lithuania]. He was sent to be a teacher in Ludza. I don’t know whether there was a Jewish or a Russian school there. He was even a rabbi in Ludza for a while.

A második világháborúról senki nem tudott előre semmit se. Még azt se tudtuk, hogy a németek be fognak jönni Magyarországra [lásd: Magyarország német megszállása].

A cséplőgépnél dolgoztatták anyámat is. Egy olyan asszonyt, aki életében soha nem csinálta azt. Belement a szalma a szemébe, annyira csípte, hogy begyulladt neki.

Both of my grandparents came from a Czech-speaking family. I don't think either of them had any higher education. My grandfather was religious and went to the synagogue regularly, not only on the main holidays, and he would take me with him.

Minden évben Hajdúszoboszlón, apám házában voltunk nyaralni. A fürdő [a termálfürdő] nagyon jó volt akkoriban. Olcsó is volt. Vonattal mentünk, és általában két-három hétig maradtunk ott. Fürödtünk, rúgtuk a port. Játszottunk, semmi különöst. Nem emlékszem, hogy merre voltunk még nyaralni.

One of my father’s sister was called Raisa, Rasel or Raisa Ilyichna as was the proper way of saying it in Russia. She was born in 1895. She graduated from the Institute for Foreign Languages in Moscow, and she taught English in technical schools in Moscow. She spent all her life in Russia, and she died there, too.

My father’s second sister, Mina, was born in 1897. She was a very impressive personality. During one of her marriages she even managed to live in the Kremlin. Aunt Mina’s son, Mihail Falkov, lives in Riga.

My father’s third sister, Ljuba, was born in 1898. After the war she ended up in Ukraine and worked in a textile workshop in Kiev for a very long time. She didn’t have a family.

My father’s youngest sister, Polina, born in 1906, was the most active, most combative woman. She lived in Moscow. But then the end of the 1930s came, when everybody who was from Latvia began to be looked at as a spy. She was accused of spying for Japan and was sent to a camp in Kolyma [region in the Northern part of Russia where the infamous Gulag [6] camps were located]. After the camp she ended up in Udmurtia, next to Izhevsk, where my father’s youngest brother, Uncle Yasha, served his sentence. While in the camp, Uncle Yasha was saved by a simple woman, whom he later married and had children with. That’s where our Udmurtian line of relatives comes from.

When the Doctors’ Plot had calmed down, Papa worked at the ministry and then, in 1955, he began to work at a timber processing plant in Elgava. He went to work there in order to receive a pension. He was the head engineer. He retired about six months before the official retirement age because he had heart problems. This was about 1959, when I finished university.

A szolnoki cukorgyárban voltunk aztán összegyűjtve, és onnan vitték aztán Auschwitzba meg a különböző helyekre a zsidókat. Mi a második transzporttal mentünk [Ez a transzport nem Auschwitzba került, hanem Strasshofba. – A szerk.].

És akkor nagyon sokan örültek neki, hogy a zsidókat viszik. Akkor valahogy kijött belőlük az, hogy irigyelték az embereket. Irigyelték apámat, aki jó volt hozzájuk, és odaadott nekik hitelbe mindent. Irigyelték a gazdagságát, irigyelték a szép házát, mert a legszebb háza volt neki Karcagon, kéttornyú ház.

But only for a very short time. Because in the meantime, they'd caught my father.

As I've already said, my father had a presidential exception. That meant that he was at home for the time being, and not taken away to a camp somewhere, but neither was he able to freely move about wherever he wanted. Well, and one day my father set out for Trnava. He wanted to see what was new, what was going on. Someone there recognized him, and denounced him. Right away, people flocked to him and that was it! They then escorted him to Banska Bystrica to the Gestapo, and there they gave him a terrible beating. I heard this from one friend of ours afterwards, how it had all happened. When they'd suddenly caught my father, my mother and brother took fright and went to hide out in Hlohovec, at the house of one of our maids who'd worked for us for years. But they didn't stay in Hlohovec for long, because at that time they were already putting up posters everywhere that whoever was hiding Jews or partisans should report it and hand them over. And our maid was afraid. She preferred to not have them there.

So my mother decided that they'd come to Bratislava to be with me, that I'd take care of them, that I had to help them. When they arrived, my brother had bloody hands and calluses from the work the woman in Hlohovec had made him do. Because she also had beet fields, and the poor guy had to work in them. When they arrived, his hands were completely mangled. So I quickly thought about what to do. I took my brother to the state hospital and they dressed his wounds. He went to have them treated every day until they improved. But they were healing slowly, and my mother wasn't trying to be inconspicuous in any way. She was wearing a folk costume, and was drawing unnecessary attention with it. And she wouldn't take it off for anything, because she claimed that it was protecting her!

So again my father took care of it. He knew this one railway worker in Bratislava, who lived on what today is Sancova Street. I moved into his home. To be less conspicuous, I had my hair bleached blond. I started working for a company named Vatra. It was a company that owned forests and sold wood to Germany. There I filled in various invoices and did office work. But before I could have a job, I had to have papers. False ones, of course. The railway man I lived with put me in touch with the forger. He told me where I'd find him and how much it cost. The forger then made me false papers in the name Polakovicova, and in them it said that I was from Snina. He left me my first name, so that I wouldn't get confused. I don't know anymore exactly how much he asked for it back then, but I know that it was quite a lot of money.

Once I was walking along the street in Bratislava, and met a former classmate of mine. And despite my bleached hair, she recognized me right away. 'You're Magda, aren't you? You're Jewish, aren't you? And you've got bleached hair?' Really, I'll tell you, some of those girls were capable of being quite mean...

After some time, however, the neighbors began asking the railway man and his family who I was and what I was. The situation began to be dangerous, for them as well as for me. One family friend of ours advised me that the wisest thing would be for me to move. So I decided that I'd find something through the classified ads. At that time Bratislava was already being bombed, and many people were leaving the city and renting out their apartments. So I answered one ad and rented a room on Grosslingova Street. So there I then lived alone.

At that time my father hadn't yet been deported, as he had a presidential exception [8], but on the other hand, he wasn't able to move about Slovakia freely. Each Jew had his assigned territory that he couldn't leave. So my father decided that he'd send one traveling salesman for me. He was this salesman that offered and sold goods all over Slovakia. My father gave him 20,000 crowns to pay the Slovak policeman for helping me, and also for finding me a hiding place. [Editor's note: The value of one Slovak crown during the time of the Slovak State (1939-1945) was equal to 31.21 mg of gold. The exchange rate between the German mark and the Slovak crown was artificially set at 1:11.]

The salesman took me with him and brought me home. I won't say any more about the hardships of this trip, but will just say that he was one lewd man, who made passes at me, and I didn't have a good feeling from it. Upon my return home, everything had changed. On the one hand, my parents were glad to have me home, but on the other hand my mother was afraid of what would happen if someone found out that I'd returned now. She was afraid, and so wanted me to leave as soon as possible, so that I wouldn't cause them any more problems than necessary.

The problem with the police there was that they weren't able to communicate with each other. The Slovak didn't speak Hungarian, and the Hungarian on the other hand didn't know even a word of Slovak. So I jumped in and somehow convinced the Hungarian policeman to hand me over to the Slovak one. By some miracle I succeeded, and for one week I found a hiding place with one pharmacist in Pavlovce. I was shut up in the bathroom, so that no one would see me. That Slovak policeman arranged that for me. In the meantime, he'd called my father to tell him about me, and they were trying to get me away from there.

My godfather drove me to the border, where I was supposed to make contact with some nuns. But they were very reluctant to help, and showed no interest in me at all. That was in Pavlovce [in the district of Vranov nad Toplou], when I asked them how I was to get home. They told me I could simply get on the bus, or train, and that I'd be home right away. That it wasn't a problem. That didn't seem right to me, because before that my godfather had warned me that without papers I shouldn't use public transport at all. He'd warned me that there were checkpoints everywhere, and they could easily catch me. But I was young, and took the nuns' advice.

I got onto the train. That's something that I really shouldn't have done. At the Slovak-Hungarian border the police caught me. They were threatening to hand me over to the Germans. That's something I didn't want to happen at any cost, and so I tried to wriggle out of it somehow. Luckily they were changing shifts, and one of the new policemen on the Slovak side knew my father. He was from around Trnava, and was very indebted to my father, who'd helped him more than once. He told me that if I succeeded to get away from the policeman on the Hungarian side, he'd help me on the Slovak side, and would help me hide somewhere and get me home somehow.

In 1942 I received a summons to Trnava. It was the very first transport which was supposed to leave, supposedly for work. But I refused. I somehow simply didn't believe that we were supposed to go someplace just to work. You see, already at that time I'd heard various rumors that there were camps for Jews in Germany, and that similar ones were being built in Poland as well. It was said that people were dying in them, and that they were even murdering them there. And that wasn't something I wanted. So I decided that I'd run away. My mother was, of course, against it at first, because she thought that by doing so I'd blacken the entire family, and that I'd harm them with it. But my father, who loved me very much, was for my leaving.

So in the end I left for Subcarpathian Ruthenia, to live with my aunt, my mother's sister Olga. I hid at her place for almost a year, and on the cusp of the years 1942 and 1943 I had to return, because the regime had changed there, too, and they'd begun to persecute Jews. Once someone gave my godfather a tip that they'd be rounding up Jews during the night, and so they hid me at the vicarage. There I spent the night, and right the next day I had to set out for home. But my trip home wasn't easy. As I was traveling without any papers, it was very dangerous and difficult. It was already 1943, and the situation was more than complicated.

In the 1970s large numbers of Jews were moving to Israel. This was actually the only possibility for the Soviet Union to move to another country. Many of our friends and acquaintances left at that time. We knew they were leaving to have their children grow up free people, having their rights respected, to never know the feeling of being treated as people of the second or third rate. These people were moving to their historic Motherland. This was a brave move on their part. We knew it, but we did not dare to make this move. We supported those who were leaving. Things were not easy for them. Authorities took every step and effort to make their life complicated.

We corresponded with our friends in Israel and were happy for their successes. None of them regretted taking this decision. We were probably very inert. It was difficult to take this decision and to make this decisive step in life. Besides, my parents were old and suffered from hot weather. I couldn’t leave them, or take them with us where they would suffer from the hot climate, and I would be to blame for their suffering and would be able to do nothing about it. So we stayed.

However, we never lost interest in watching news from Israel. During the Six-Day-War [39] and the Judgment Day War [40], we watched the course of military actions and were worried about Israel. We were on the side of Israel, and felt happy about its military successes. The official Soviet mass media deployed a wide-range anti-Israeli campaign calling Israel an aggressor and invader. The bigger Israel’s victories were, the stronger the hysteria was.

During perestroika the Jewish life in Latvia began to revive. In 1988 the Jewish cultural society was officially registered. In recent years it has significantly grown and strengthened. Jews finally felt themselves to be Jewish. My husband Aron returned to Jewish life. He read many books about the history of the Jewish people and their religion. Aron knew Hebrew in his childhood. He restored his knowledge to read the Torah and prayers. Aron went to the synagogue on Sabbath, and on Jewish holidays he and I went to the synagogue together.

We observed Jewish traditions at home. On Friday evening I lit candles and prayed over them. On Saturday my husband went to the synagogue. I stayed at home, but I did no work at home. I left whatever chores I had for Sunday. On Saturday my husband and I read aloud and visited our friends or went for a walk. We celebrated Pesach, Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Chanukkah and Sukkot, the biggest Jewish holidays, at home. We just couldn’t follow all traditions strictly, but we did our best.

Mama died in 1987. We buried her at the Jewish cemetery in Riga. However, we didn’t arrange a Jewish funeral. In 1993 we buried my father beside Mama’s grave. My husband died in 2004. His funeral was a traditional Jewish one. This was my husband’s wish, and I followed it.