Hlinka’s Guard drove us out to Hungary, completely destitute
Download image
Jaffa Krausz, née Isabela Burger, was born the youngest of four siblings in a Jewish family in Velká Lomnica, Slovakia on 17 January 1920. Her father was a merchant and died early, so her mother ran the household. The family lived in Poprad. The Hlinka Guard forced the mother, grandfather, grandmother and Isabela to leave for Hungary on 8 November 1939 without any resources. The eldest brother and sister were living in Palestine by then while the other brother was as a printer in Bratislava. In Hungary, Isabela Burger worked briefly in a joinery shop until she and her grandmother managed to cross the border back to Slovakia illegally at the end of November (her grandfather and mother ended up in Košice, which was Hungary at the time). They returned to Poprad, only to find the family house ransacked. Later on, she reunited with her mother and grandfather who had made their way back home from Košice in a similarly complicated way. In Poprad, Isabela Burger experienced the Slovak anti-Semitic policy: the family’s small shop was conficscated, they had to wear yellow stars, they were not allowed to leave the house in the evening, and there was a ban on raising pets. In March 1942, Isabela left Slovakia under a false identity facing a threat of transport to the Auschwitz extermination camp. She left Poprad on a night train for Prešov and illegally crossed the border into Hungary. For the next two years, she lived in Budapest as Elsa Katz and earned a living as a manual labourer. When the Germans occupied Hungary in 1944, she fled to Romania and stayed in Bucharest for several weeks. In the Romanian capital, she managed to make contact with the Zionist movement, which helped her and other Jewish refugees to travel to Palestine. She arrived in Palestine in June 1944 and reunited with her brother and sister. Her mother died in the Ravensbrück concentration camp, her other brother survived the war in Sachsenhausen, and her grandparents had died before the deportations began. Isabel Burger married Chaim Ernest Krausz in Palestine and lived on Kibbutz Kfar Masaryk in northern Israel.
