Juraj Alexander

"I was actually born Tanenbaum, I didn't know that until I was fifteen. Because my father Tanenbaum was taken from Židovská street when I was seventeen or eleven days old. That house stands where the Museum of Jewish Judaism is now, on the edge of Židovská street. It's really interesting that the house is standing. They took us from there and my mother said that she - the Slovak said that 'you too will go', the guardsman and the German said in German that 'not you can stay here with that child', which was me. There they took her mother, my father and sister, about five people. No one survived. And my aunt, my mother's sister, older, she was a pianist, and then in our family, or something, there is a musical tradition, she was big. Well, my brother, not my brother, my, my mother's brother, they were evacuated in Piešťany during the war, and the sister immediately went to the gas. And my mother lived through it with me, because they then deported us from Sereď to Terezín and luckily there, but in May, when the Russians came, they freed us. And it took a very long time before we returned here, and my mother remembers one thing, which I am very sorry that she did not know, because I would certainly have a very deep relationship with those people, that when they were returning from Terezin through Bohemia and they stopped somewhere in Moravia, people from the surrounding villages gave them water there, and that they were very golden, but he doesn't remember where it was at all. They gave us water... Well, I was a baby, so what - I don't have a drop of mother's milk, so what? And my mother also said that when they came to Terezin, she said that 'das ist Todesstrafem', because my mother had this kerosene or oil or I don't know what for cooking and a cooker and she said, 'well, it will be Todesstrafe'. "So, what will I feed my child?". Well, then they let her do it, so there she was, she was amazing. And that's why in our house there was always a stove as a symbol, a stove on which you could pour kerosene or something, an electric stove, yes, or something like that, yes, and then some kind of flour and salt. That's always been with us."