"My mother told me how they were driven to the brickyard along Štúrova Street and people were standing on the sidewalks. She told that story in just two or three sentences. I didn't ask about it myself. It's traumatic even for the listener when your parent says it. They took the whole family there, including her sister Katarina, who had the same name as my sister. They went from the brickyard to the train to Auschwitz. My grandparents, because they were over 60, were immediately sent somewhere. They and my sister survived that way, and they were lucky in that they didn't have to go through that hell in Auschwitz. They were young and seemed strong to the Germans, so they were sent to the vicinity of Riga, where they worked in the woods collecting wood. I have no details about that either. So my mother was, in quotation marks, only three days in Auschwitz and then they were sent somewhere else. Interestingly, about a week ago, we were in a café with my mother. We were looking through a book with photographs of the Norwegian fjords. She was leafing through this and in one photo she told me that this is what they saw near Riga."
"They didn't remember the beginnings, but I know that back in my childhood my mother once got angry because she went to the national committee to ask for something because a lot of people were poor and needed support. Some person there said to her, `You should have better stayed in gas', or something like that. Unfortunately, people encountered that all too often after the war. And they couldn't react, because it's hard to say what would have been an appropriate reaction. After all, they were afraid of what would befall them afterwards."
"I was in Košice and I remember it as if it was today and I will never forget it for the rest of my life. At four in the morning, I was woken up by a huge rumbling. Timonova Street is only 100 metres from Štúrova Street, and back then there was no asphalt, but large cobblestones, so those tanks were really booming there. My mother wouldn't let me go into the streets because she was afraid that it would be the same as during the Hungarian occupation, that they would capture boys and take them into the army. I wasn't some kind of rebel, or I don't know what to call it, who would defy that and climb over the fence. So I was at home."
"I remember one case. Apparently, for those kids, it was quite common to say "zidko"[little Jew] to somebody. But when a Jewish kid hears it, it touches them. In about the fourth or fifth grade, I was nominated for class president, and a little primitive shouted out that little Jew! Later, I went home and it made my father incredibly angry. He came to school and grabbed the boy by the ears and went to the principal with him. It blew up a bit. The boy's parents also came to the school, dissatisfied with the situation. It didn't have a follow-up after that, I just remembered the story. This existed until '89 and I suppose it's still in people's minds because legends and myths survive for a very long time and can't be uprooted. Therefore, they cannot be eradicated because very little is being done to, not to set the record straight, but to give examples and dispel these myths. Because books and talks don't do the job, but that's another subject."
Pavol Šalamon descends from a Jewish family from Košice. His family was marked by the Holocaust. Although he himself was born after the Second World War, he perceived the impact of the Holocaust very sensitively in his family, especially from his mother’s story. It was her immediate family who did not return from the concentration camps. By coincidence, the witness was offered a position as an archivist and documentarist, where he also had the opportunity to document the Holocaust. His father, Alfréd Šalamon (b. 1914), came from Subcarpathian Ruthenia and was a painter of houses and apartments. His mother Edita, née Neumanová (1923), came from the village of Zemplínske Jastrabie and was a homemaker, but she earned extra income by sewing. His parents had lived in Košice since childhood. Pavel’s father survived part of the war as a member of the Hungarian and later Czechoslovak army, his mother went through a concentration camp and forced labour for the Germans. Pavel was born in 1951 and his sister two years later in 1953. Pavol was musically and linguistically gifted, taking cello and contrabass lessons. Already in high school he played in a band of his classmates. Among the languages he knew were English, French, Russian, Hungarian, as well as Latin. He studied languages at the Comenius University in Bratislava. As a student he survived the times of normalization. He devoted himself to studying and playing in folklore ensembles. After school he got a job at the State Archive in Košice, where he used his knowledge of Latin and Hungarian. He was not an active dissident, but he perceived the communist regime negatively. In retrospect, he admires people who actively spoke out against the regime despite the threat of punishment. This is why he welcomed the Velvet Revolution in 1989 and the fall of the Communist Party regime. However, he soon became disillusioned with the development of society, which was moving towards nationalism, culminating in the break-up of Czechoslovakia. In the mid-1990s, he went to work in Budapest at the Open Society Archive at the Central European University. He stayed there for almost 20 years, also getting a job at the Holocaust Documentation Centre (Holokauszt Dokumentációs Központ és Emlékgyűjtemény).
