She hid in a chimney for three months. Her parents were murdered in Treblinka and her sister in Auschwitz
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Magda Korach, née Tofflerová, was born in Gelnica, eastern Slovakia on 17 August 1916. Her father was a grocer and the leader of the local Jewish community prior to the war. Her mother was a housewife and the parents had two other daughters, Lili and Klára. German was spoken at home, so the Toffler daughters went to a German elementary school. Magda then completed a two-year business academy in Vienna and took part in her father’s business. After the dissolution of Czechoslovakia in 1939, the family experienced the first anti-Semitic attacks in and around Gelnica. With the arrival in Slovakia of the Tiso administration, the father was interned for a period of time in the prison in Ilava along with other wealthy Jewish businessmen. The family’s trade and private property were confiscated on 25 October 1941. In March 1942, Magda married Ladislav Korach, a former Czechoslovak army officer. The deportations of Jews from Slovakia for the extermination camps began just days later. In April 1942, her father, mother and sister Lily were taken allegedly for a farm job in Poland. Her parents were murdered in Treblinka and her sister in Auschwitz. Magda escaped deportation because her Jewish origin was not mentioned in her identity card. The Korachs lived in Banská Bystrica where her husband worked manually in a chemical factory. Her pregnant sister Klára hid at their home for some time. After the outbreak of the Slovak National Uprising, she and husband with other people left for the mountains but were captured by German soldiers after a few days. In Banská Bystrica, Magda deceived the interrogating SS men and escaped to freedom. For the next three months she hid in a chimney in her former neighbour’s house. She met her husband in another hiding place with a peasant family in a village near Banská Bystrica. There they both lived to see the liberation by the Red Army. After the war, they lived in Opatová near Lučenec where Ladislav Korach found a job. In 1948 they moved to the newly founded state of Israel. Her husband worked in a textiles factory and later became a representative of a Swiss textile factory in Israel. Magda Korach took care of the family. She passed away in 2017.
