One day the Gestapo searched the Bacons’ apartment. They found a slab of butter ‘which a Polish engine driver had brought us’. He had forgotten his coat. Yehuda’s mother had the presence of mind to put it around her shoulders so it wouldn’t be noticed. Yehuda’s father was summoned to appear, because of the butter. He went to the Jewish community to ask for support, and it intervened with the Gestapo. After a while, Isidor Bacon was able to return home. He had been interrogated by two Gestapo men. But when he was alone with one of them, he was told: ‘Don’t worry, nothing will happen to you.’
In early 1939, the Jewish inhabitants were registered for forced labour. In the middle of the year, two synagogues were set on fire by the Nazis.50 Then, in October, 1,192 Jews were transported from Ostrava to Nisko in Poland, where they were supposed to build a camp. The project was abandoned in April 1940 and several hundred Jewish men were returned to Ostrava.51 A few years later, Majdanek concentration camp was established in Lublin, 100 kilometres north of Nisko.
Dagmar Fantlová The 8-year-old Dagmar also first learned that ‘something was going on in Germany’ around 1937. ‘A man, probably a rabbi, turned up in Kutná Hora. He was from Germany, I don’t remember which part. He had published a book. I can only recall the cover. It showed a man with a sign behind a gate on which was written: “Jude verrecke im eigenen Drecke” [May the Jews croak in their own filth].’
Dagmar heard people saying that some people were sending their children to England. This was barely discussed in her family. She and Rita were still too small. They had an aunt who wanted to emigrate with her husband, but somehow never managed to do so.
Later, there was a young man from the border region, from Cheb [Eger in German]. His parents had emigrated and he was meant to follow them later, but he didn’t manage to do so. He arrived on his own in Kutná Hora. My parents invited him for lunch every Sunday. He would always say that he wouldn’t go to the Theresienstadt camp and ghetto. But that’s where he ended up. My father said to him in Theresienstadt: ‘You see, you’re here after all.’ He replied: ‘There’s still a way out.’ But he never came back.
In early 1939, the rabbi from Germany disappeared from Kutná Hora as suddenly as he had arrived. It marked the start of a new series of events. On 15 March 1939, German troops entered Kutná Hora. ‘My father came to my bed early in the morning. He woke me and said: “We’ve lost the republic.” He was crying. This was something quite out of the ordinary for me. I’d never seen my father cry before.’ Dagmar got up and went to school. Nothing had changed there. ‘Only the weather was bad that day.’
When she came home at lunchtime, her father spoke about a visit to a patient. ‘He was driving on the left-hand side of the road. That’s how it was in those days. A German column was coming in the other direction, driving on the right. They stopped him and told him he should drive on the right.’ Julius Fantl came home in ‘deep shock’.
One day – it must have been a holiday – the Sudeten German lodger Zotter said to Julius Fantl: ‘I’d like to hang out the swastika flag.’ Dagmar’s father replied: ‘Herr Zotter, I’m sure you know that swastikas are not allowed to be flown in Jewish houses.’
‘I’d just hang it between the windows.’ And that’s what he did. Some time later, Zotter became the trustee of the shoe factory where he worked. This meant that all of the previous owners’ rights were extinguished and transferred to the trustee.52 Now he wanted to live in the house of the Jewish owner, which also contained the Jewish community offices. Zotter ordered the Jewish community to move to Julius Fantl’s house.
One of the Jewish families in Kutná Hora had to move out of their home. ‘They came to us, in the grandparents’ rooms. They moved into our apartment.’ On 23 October 1939, the order was given to dismiss all Jewish employees. And on 26 January 1940, Jews were forbidden from managing textile, shoe and leatherwear businesses. This and other measures, such as the obligation to register the company (7 February) and the employer’s private assets (16 March), were important steps towards ‘Aryanization’, as it was called. What followed was the expropriation of the Jews on a grand scale.53
Eduard Kornfeld When he was 6 or 7 years old, Eduard first experienced ‘something like antisemitism’ as he was on his way to school. Children called him a ‘Saujude’ [‘Jewish pig’]. And on the walls would be scrawled ‘Zydy do Palestuny’ [‘Jews to Palestine’].
‘At first I didn’t understand what it all meant. What had the Jews or I done to deserve that? I didn’t even know what Palestine was.’ He thought about it a lot, and throughout his life it always hurt him deeply inside.
On 14 March 1939, the day before the German Wehrmacht invaded Bohemia and Moravia, the declaration of independence by the vassal Slovakia, the first puppet state of Nazi Germany, was announced. Prior to this, leading Slovak politicians had promised the German Reich that they would settle the ‘Jewish question’ on the German model. An authoritarian antisemitic one-party government, Hlinka’s Slovak People’s Party (named after a Slovak nationalist and anti-Jewish priest and politician), came to power. A month later, on 18 April 1939, the first antisemitic regulations were promulgated by the Slovak government. The number of Jews in the professions was drastically reduced. From then on, Jewish lawyers could only represent Jews, Jews were not allowed to have a concession for a public pharmacy, Jewish journalists could only work in Jewish newspapers, and the number of doctors with practices was limited to 4 per cent of the members of the Medical Council.54
It became more and more dangerous for the Kornfeld family to go out onto the street. Harassment and organized attacks on the Jews of Bratislava increased.
The Hitler Youth, the Hlinka Guard and the voluntary Schutzstaffel [paramilitary units formed by the German minority in Slovakia] beat up us Jews more and more frequently, quite brutally. For example, there was a poor Sudeten German family, whom my father had always helped. They had several children, and my father often gave them bread. Later, one of these sons joined the German SS, and one day he came and beat up my father. That was how he showed his thanks for our help. It was a terrible experience.
In 1940, there were around 18,000 Jews in Bratislava, one-fifth or one-sixth of the total number of Jews in Slovakia. There were several synagogues, eleven batei midrash (Talmud colleges), two Jewish cemeteries, a hospital, an old people’s home, an orphanage, a large community hall and library, several banks, chemists, insurance companies, fifty Jewish doctors, sixty-five lawyers and thirty engineers.55
Between 1938 and 1942, the situation of the Jewish inhabitants of Slovakia became intolerable. ‘The political climate was threatening. Our synagogues were destroyed, Torah scrolls torn and thrown onto the street. And we Jews were increasingly attacked and beaten bloody.’
The systematic anti-Jewish legislation by the Slovak state meant that only small amounts could be withdrawn from Jewish bank accounts. Or that ‘we Jews were basically banned from visiting restaurants, theatres or cinemas, or from entering public swimming pools or parks’. Jews were also banned from living in certain areas and in streets named after Hitler and Hlinka. This applied to 10,931 Jewish homes in fifty-two larger towns, where 43,124 Jewish children, women and men had lived before being forced to move.
The Kornfelds were also obliged to move. ‘We moved three times, I think. Once to near the Jewish school. That was still a good area. From there we moved to the Jewish ghetto’, where they remained ‘until the end’. Eduard’s father had first had to give up his linen goods shop ‘because Jews were no longer allowed to reside in that area’. In order to feed the family, he bought a bakery near the ghetto.
‘One day he had to give up this business as well.’ Jews were to be fully excluded from the Slovak economy. Within a short time, over 9,000 Jewish businesses – like Simon Kornfeld’s – were liquidated and over 1,800 ‘Aryanized’, in other words transferred to non-Jewish owners.56
Following the introduction of the Jewish Codex in autumn 1941, marriages between Jews, or ‘Mischlinge’, and non-Jews became a punishable