She asked me how old I was and I said 15. And she said that if they ask me, I should say 18. And that, I think, saved my life.
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Eva Haarová, today Gerhard, was born in February 1929 in a family that owned a hat boutique on Bratislava’s Obchodná Street. She lost her mother when she was 12 years old, which also meant that she started taking care of the business. The first deportations deprived her of several cousins. However, she stayed in Bratislava, where she also experienced the bombing. After the Slovak national Uprising she was deported to a concentration camp together with her brother and grandmother. The father managed to miraculously escape when he jumped into a moving tram. However, the rest of the family traveled through Sereď to Auschwitz, where Eva lost both of her loved ones. Dr. Mengele sent her to work in a factory in Freiberg. She experienced liberation already in Mauthausen, where they were taken before the arrival of the liberators. She came home in May 1945 so emaciated that her father did not recognize her from her cousin. She immediately went back to school. The Aryanized trade was returned to them after the war. She and her husband first thought about emigrating when their talented daughter was not taken to school. When ŠtB asked Eva’s husband for cooperation, they emigrated to Israel, but they were not satisfied, so they moved to America. There, Eva’s daughter studied molecular biology and worked as a distinguished scientist at the US National Cancer Institute.
