"They were in the apartment and they could not go out. So mother brought them food. There was no toilet, so my father had to take out the feces. So it was all sorts of things. And they survived there. Mom then received an award from an Israeli organization. They sent her $70 each month, which was a big reward for that time. She had a three hundred euro pension. She would get $1,000 for Christmas. But every year she had to send a confirmation that she was still alive.”
"He would visit us. I remember him very well as a child. To me he was like … my father didn't really take care of me, to tell the truth. He drove me on a motorcycle. He fulfilled my boyish dreams. He rode horses and was quite good at it. He took me to Petržaka. He opened a new world for me. Over time, I forgot about it. I knew he ran away. I learned that as an adult. I didn't notice such things as a child. It was rumored that he had succeeded. I once read a newspaper and some historian wrote about his escape. And I was like, damn it, I know this man. I started rummaging through the old photos we had at home. I found a bunch of photos of him from that time. Then his oral history was found, where he talks about his whole life."
"I experienced things such as some shooting on the street. I had my own car assigned to me, and every day when I came to the building, the chassis was checked for bombs. It was just after the war. Smoke was still billowing from some of the buildings because they had been bombed. But for example the theater worked, I was there at some Vivaldi concert. It was interesting, being in a destroyed country and listening to Vivaldi.”
"My father was ill, he had the flu. Almost the whole family was with us and they played cards. Suddenly someone rang and there were four or five guys in leather coats standing outside the door. ‘Does Mr. Sebo live here?’ And my mother said yes. ‘We came for him.’ And she said why. ‘That's our business!’ They came in, I guess my father was still in his pajamas. 'Get dressed and come with us!' I cried right away. And my father said to me, 'Don't cry, you are already a pioneer!' He told me. I remember that sentence. Interestingly, they did a home search right away. They threw everything away, the whole apartment. There were two or three men. My grandfather, he was an old laborer and a communist, they also took him to the police. Another one was a friend of my father, he was a kind of businessman. He sold watches and dollars. When they led them away, this one - we called him Deaf, because he did not hear well. Because when he had the business, they attacked him and shot him. But he had a pen in his pocket, and the bullet bounced off his ear, and he became deaf. So they also took Deaf and Grandpa to the police. Grandpa was released immediately because they saw that he was a communist cadre. But they left this Deaf there. Before, when they were taking them away and getting inside the cars, he would empty his pockets - watches, doxas and dollars. "
The writer Juraj Šebo was born in 1943 in Bratislava into a petit bourgeois family. His grandparents met in Chicago, USA, where they moved to earn money. After his return, his grandfather was a member of Hlinka’s party in Žilina. Grandma had her own tailoring salon. As a native Jew, she had to hide during the Second World War. His other grandfather owned a pub in Trnávka. The father of the witness was a dental technician in Bratislava with his own practice, his mother a housewife. The parents hid a seven-member Jewish family in the apartment during World War II. Juraj’s godfather Arnošt Rosin was deported to Auschwitz in 1942, from where he managed to escape. In 1948, his father had his equipment confiscated and joined a state-owned enterprise. In 1950, the father of the witness was sentenced to six years of forced labor as a political prisoner. Juraj Šebo had issues being accepted to school. He was eventually accepted to the Secondary General Education School on Makarenkova Street and later continued at the University of Transport in Žilina. For five years during university he was the singer of a number of big beat bands. He married in 1968 and has two children. On August 28, 1968, he was just graduating when the Warsaw Pact troops invaded the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic. After graduating, he joined the West Slovak Directorate of Transportation in Bratislava, where he worked for thirty years. In 1983 and 1987 he competed in cross-country skiing in Finland. After meeting emigrants, he never again received a travel permit. In 1992, his mother Oľga Šebová was honored and her name inscribed on the Wall of Honor in the Garden of the Righteous in Jerusalem. In 1999, he went to Kosovo to build a postal network for a year. He divorced and married for the second time in 2000. In 2003, he left his role as the regional director of the post office and returned to Kosovo for three months. In the years 2005 - 2006 he became the president of a parcel delivery service. In retirement, he began writing books. He has almost 20 to his name.
