Eyewitness to History: Arye Ephrath

Bill Benson: Welcome. Thank you for joining us for First Person: Conversations with Holocaust Survivors.

I'm Bill Benson, and I have hosted First Person since it began at the Museum in 2000. Each month we bring you first-hand accounts of survival of the Holocaust. 

Each of our First Person guests serves as a volunteer at the Museum. 

We are honored to have Holocaust survivor Arye Ephrath share his personal first-hand account of the Holocaust with us today. 

Arye, thank you so much for joining us and your willingness to be our First Person.

Arye Ephrath: Thank you Bill for inviting me to this program.

Bill Benson: Arye, you have so very much to share with us today in a short time so we'll start right away.

Your parents were married in Slovakia in 1941 almost two years after World War II began in September 1939. 

Before we turn to what happened to you and your family during World War II and the Holocaust, please introduce us to your parents, starting with your father, and tell us what you know of their lives before you were born.

Arye Ephrath: Thank you. This is a photograph taken long before the war of my father's family with my grandfather and grandmother in the center. 

My father was one of six boys and two girls in the family. He's standing in the back row on the left. 

My uncle Lazar is also in the back row second from right, and later in the program I would like to say something about Lazar as well.

Not everybody in the family is in this picture. 

There is one sister and one brother who did not make it to the picture. 

I do want to point out that from this family, eight members of this small family were murdered during the Holocaust.

Bill Benson: Arye, tell us about your father's business.

Arye Ephrath: My grandfather owned the only general store in the little town that they lived in, a town named Bardejov in the east of Slovakia. 

A general store is basically a mini or a micro department store.

It's a small store and it has a little bit of almost anything. 

And my father and one of his brothers worked with my grandfather in that store, that provided the family with a reasonably comfortable living.

Bill Benson: And what about your mother? Tell us about her and her family.

Arye Ephrath: My mother was born in Hungary. 

She and her family lived in a town named Beregszász which at the time was part of Hungary. 

Since then, it had been taken over by the Ukraine and it is in the Ukraine to this very day. 

She was one of four children. 

She had one sister and two brothers.

Her father, my grandfather, was a lumber merchant. 

And my mother was a very non-typical Hungarian young woman in that she worked with my father -- she was with my grandfather -- she was both his bookkeeper, his office manager. 

She used to take trips to the forests to mark the trees that need to be cut down to be made into lumber. 

She used to run up and down the lumber piles in the lumber yard to count the lumber to keep account of everything. 

She was quite active in that, which was very unusual for a young Hungarian woman at that time.

Bill Benson: You were born April 7th, 1942. 

From the moment you were born, your life was in danger. 

The first wave of deportations of Jews from Slovakia had begun just weeks earlier. 

Tell us about what happened with your family on the day you were born.

Arye Ephrath: In 1942 the year I was born, Slovakia was still an independent country. 

It had not been invaded by the Nazis yet. 

That would happen two years later. 

But the government of Slovakia and especially the president of Slovakia, a Catholic priest by the name of Jozef Tiso, he was a great admirer of the Nazis and he tried to emulate them.

And Slovakia became the first, and as far as I know, the only country in Europe who collaborated with the Nazis to the extent that they deported their own Jewish citizens into the Nazi concentration camps, and this started in the spring of 1942.

And the day that I was born was also the day of the first transport of deported Jews from Bardejov to a recently opened extermination camp in nearby Poland.

On that day the order went out in Bardejov for a list of Jews to report to the train station to be deported to Auschwitz.

My mother was in labor with me and she could not possibly comply. 

Instead she hid in the basement of my parents' house and she gave birth to me with the help of our housekeeper Maria.

My father refused to comply and he and quite a few other Jews in Bardejov escaped. 

They fled to the forest surrounding Bardejov and hid in the forest until darkness.

And after darkness, he came back home to find out that he became a father. 

My mother's obstetrician, Dr. Rudolf Radač, he was not Jewish, he was Catholic, but there was a rumor in town that he had some Jewish blood in him.

And based on that rumor, he was included in the list of people to report to the train station. 

He also fled to the woods outside of Bardejov and came back after darkness to minister to my mother and help her out and take care of her.

Bill Benson: And Arye, your father once he came back and your mother gave birth, he ended up being allowed to continue running his store because it was important to the livelihood of the community. 

And tell us just a little bit about that.

Arye Ephrath: This was the only -- their store was the only store of its kind in Bardejov and the town depended on the services of the store, and so the authorities granted my father a certificate called "Wichtige Jude" which means an important or essential Jew.

And that certificate protected him from that point on -- exempted him from being deported for as long as the certificate was enforced. 

It did not cover his family though and my mother and me.

Bill Benson: So after about a year after your birth, living under those circumstances, your parents realized it was no longer safe for you and your mother to remain in Slovakia. 

So your parents decided to have your mother take you to Hungary while your father remained in Bardejov. 

How did they manage, how did your mom and your father figure out how to get you over the border into Hungary?

Arye Ephrath: My father had arranged for my mother to have forged identity papers presenting her as an non-Jewish single woman, and since she was native Hungarian, they figured that being in Hungary probably would be the best place for her at the time, with me. 

They hired a local woman who made her living by smuggling refugees across the border between Slovakia and Hungary to take me over the border. 

She tried once at night and she was caught.

They had to bail her out.

Then she tried again, and she was caught again, and they had to bail her out again.

And for the third time my mother decided to take things into her own hands. 

She gave me a sleeping pill, I was maybe a year old. 

She gave me a sleeping pill, put me in a large pillowcase, and put me over her shoulders and crossed the border into Hungary with me.

Bill Benson: That's just extraordinary.

So she makes it over the border. 

What did she do with you and her once she was in Hungary?

Arye Ephrath: Well, of course she couldn't keep me with her because she was supposed to be a single lady.

She found a Catholic orphanage in Budapest which was run by an elderly pediatrician, a lady named Ágnes Parcer.

Dr. Ágnes Parcer.

Dr. Parcer was a very strict disciplinarian. 

Her idea of raising little children was that if you don't eat your spinach at lunch, then you will get the same spinach again at dinner and if need be, then tomorrow, the next day at breakfast until you decided you like spinach. 

And she had never been married. 

And so she agreed to take me in and keep me in the orphanage. 

She did not allow my mother to come and visit me and perhaps she was right about that, about not getting me upset each time my mother left.

So my mother made it a habit -- there was a small park across the street from Dr. Parcer's orphanage and there were a couple of benches in the park, and she would come every day and sit on one of the benches and hope that her little boy would show up through the window or maybe on the terrace while he's playing with the other kids.

Bill Benson: Arye, tell us how your mom was surviving herself while she was there during that time.

Arye Ephrath: The law in Hungary and basically everywhere in Slovakia -- everywhere in Europe -- was that renters house renters needed to report to the police about each new person that they are renting to.  

And my mother knew that and she knew that it would take the police approximately maybe a month, three weeks or a month, to realize that her papers were forged. 

And so she would rent a room or an apartment and pay the rent for the month ahead of time, and then she would stay there for three weeks and then skip the place and go to another part of town and rent another place in another police precinct. 

And that's the way that she stayed ahead of the law for about a year, the year that we were in Hungary.

Bill Benson: And during that year that you were in Hungary and as well as your mother of course, do you know what that time was like for your father and his family in Slovakia?

Arye Ephrath: Things were getting worse and worse in Slovakia.

The Nazis did not invade Slovakia yet, but the government as I said was  very pro-Nazi and there was a very large increase in the fascist feelings among the populations.

My uncle Lazar whom I pointed out in the picture, he was married, he had a little boy named Tommy. 

One evening he was walking home back from work on the main main street. 

He was confronted by a gang of young Slovak fascists who demanded to know whether he was Jewish. 

And he confirmed that indeed he was at which point they beat him to death with bats and with axe handles. 

Now of course, Slovakia had a law against that kind of behavior. 

If those young thugs had killed a stray dog that way on the main street, the police would hunt them down and bring them to justice.

But in this case since the victim was just a young Jew, they did not see any public interest in pursuing it and they closed the case.

Bill Benson: In August 1944, German troops invaded Slovakia to combat resistance groups. 

They eventually began organizing roundups and deportations of Jews.

At that time your father decided it was time for the family to find a more secure hiding place.

Tell us where your father took the family, and how did he find a place to go?

Arye Ephrath: My father, even though he didn't have much of a formal education, was one of the smartest and sharpest people I've ever known. 

He was a realist and he could see what was happening.

So he did some research to this day I don't know exactly how he managed to do that, and he found out that there was one village in Slovakia, in western Slovakia, named Šišov that was unique in the sense that it never had any Jews among its population.

And that was very unusual because by that time Jews had lived in all of Europe for many hundreds of years and there were Jews living everywhere.

But Šišov didn't have any Jews and he thought it was a good place to hide because the Nazis would not bother to go search for Jews in a place that was known not to have any. 

And so my mother and I and he traveled to Šišov. 

We were joined also by another Jewish family from Bardejov.

Shlomo Schöndorf was my father's childhood friend, since childhood. 

And Shlomo Schöndorf believed that my father was born under a lucky star, that he was a very lucky person.

And he believed that if any Jew in Europe was going to survive this catastrophe, this Holocaust, my father would be the one and he wanted to be standing right next to him when that happens.

And so he and his wife and their child who was a year older than I, whose name was Victor but we called him Vicki, they joined us and the six of us made our way, and I do not know how, from Bardejov on the eastern edge of Slovakia to Šišov on the western edge.

Bill Benson: So after making that journey, the six of you arrived in Šišov. What happened then?

Arye Ephrath: They arrived in Šišov and they made their way directly to the church, the Catholic church in Šišov. 

This is the church and it is still standing there and it still looks very much the same.

They presented themselves to the priest, and they said very clearly, "We are Jewish, we are running for our lives. Would you hide us?"

Now that was a very tense and awkward situation to both sides because the rule, the law under the Nazis was that anybody who hid Jews would be immediately shot.

Anybody who helped Jews hide would be immediately shot. 

Anybody who knew about Jews hiding somewhere and not reporting it to the authorities would be shot on the spot, and not only them but the rest of their families

and sometimes in a village, the Nazis would actually set the entire village on fire, on its inhabitants,

on the theory that if the Jews were found in that village, the village inhabitants must have known about that and they didn't report it, and therefore they deserved punishment. 

And so they put the priest in a very awkward position letting him know who they were.

Of course they put themselves in a terrible risk because what the priest should have done by the law is immediately report that these Jews are looking to hide, but he didn't.

He said, "I will hide you in my church but I can only hide the adults.

Hiding little children is just too risky and I cannot take that risk, so you will have to find some other arrangement for your children."

Bill Benson: And somehow or another they did. 

They found some other arrangements.  

Tell us how they found a shelter for you and for Vicki, and you're just two and three years old. 

Arye Ephrath: We are. And they were standing there in the church looking around and trying to figure out what can be done, when my father spotted on the top of a hill right outside of the village, outside of Šišov on the top of a hill, there was a single home, a single house. 

And he asked the priest, "Whose house is that?" 

And the priest explained that that is the village shepherd, he takes care of the sheep and the goats that the villagers raised. 

Instead of every farmer in the village taking care of their own sheep and goats, they appointed one of them to be a shepherd.

They built him a house outside of the village downwind on top of a hill, and that's where they keep their sheep and that's where he lived with his family. 

And my parents and the other family, the Schöndorfs, said that sounds like a perfect place perhaps for the children.

And so they trekked their way up the hill and met the shepherd's family. 

His name was Ján Mierni.

His wife was Irena Mierni. 

They had four daughters of their own, ranging in age from about six to about 12. 

And they did the same thing again, they presented themselves. They said, "We are Jews.

We might have found a place for ourselves to hide but we are looking for a place for the children.

Would you be willing to take the children in with you into your home until the war is over?"

At that time, this is the fall of 1944.

The Allies have already landed in Normandy, the BBC is broadcasting to the European population, "Hang on, it won't take long. We are coming for you."  

And so everybody believed that the war would be over in a matter of maybe a few weeks, maybe a couple of months. 

And so and the Miernis said, "Yes we are, we will be we will take care of your children while you are hiding." 

They did have -- Ján actually -- he had had two conditions to that. 

And the first condition he said, "Everybody in the village knows that we have four daughters, and if they spot little boys running around the house or running around in the yard, it would raise suspicion. 

So I would like these children of yours to be dressed as girls so they won't stand out among my daughters." And I didn't have any problem with that and my parents didn't have any problems with that.

Vicki was a year older than I, he was already three and he had a big problem with being dressed as a girl. 

He absolutely refused.

And so the compromise was reached that Vicki would not leave the house during daylight hours, he would be hiding inside the home while it was light outside and he can come out only after darkness, which was inconvenient because the outhouse, of course, is also outside the house, but that was the arrangement and we all agreed to that. 

Ján also had -- this is Ján in the back and that is Irena holding Vicki with the right hand and me with the left hand with my doll and my red bow in my hair. 

They named me Anna. 

Everybody called me Annička, and that's who I was.

I was, Annička Mierni, the shepherd's daughter.

Bill Benson: And there you are again in that picture. 

So the idea is, dressed as a girl, if you're out in the yard and anybody spots you, they're just going to think you're one of the four daughters.

Arye Ephrath: That's exactly right.

Ján had another condition though, and that was a little bit more difficult.

Since they didn't have any sons, he wanted my parents to sign a paper giving him and Irena the right to adopt me legally as their own son should my parents not come for me at the end of the war.

That was very difficult. 

First of all we are Jewish, they are Catholic. 

My parents don't know them, they are complete strangers they have just met.

Giving your firstborn to complete strangers could not have been an easy decision.

But they didn't have much of a choice and they agreed and they signed.

And to this day I think that if things have worked out differently, then today I could have been a very successful shepherd in Slovakia.

Bill Benson: Was the Mierni family kind to you, and how did you adjust to living with this new family?

Arye Ephrath: The Miernis, especially Irena and the daughters, they were absolutely great.

I was very lucky to be with them. 

They treated Vicki and me as their own children.

Very quickly I came to think of them as my parents.

I did not really -- I had not had much contact with my parents before this because I was in an orphanage in Hungary and my father was in Slovakia.

Ján was worried of course that somebody might come to the house unannounced and spot Vicki and me there.

And so he devised a procedure that if anybody is seen approaching the house, he would clap his hand and he would say "teraz!" which means "now" in Slovak.

And Vicki and I had designated hiding places that we would immediately go to and hide until he came and told us it was okay to come out.

My place of hiding was the coal bin next to the coal burning stove in the kitchen. 

That was a very large bin, it was full of coal and I was supposed to jump in and close the lid over me.

I absolutely hated that bin.

It was pitch dark in there, I was very afraid of that.

The coal, it was dusty. The coal has a lot of black dust.

I was a neat freak,liked to be clean and getting this black dust on me really bothered me a lot. 

And and the coal has a very peculiar odor, a very peculiar smell to it.

To this very day I cannot stand the smell of coal.

And I was supposed to be there very quiet until Ján came and picked me up and to this day I remember those. 

Also, Ján every day at the end of the work day, he would walk downhill to the village and meet with his friends in the pub and have a beer or two, or maybe more than that.

And then at the end of the evening he would come back uphill to the house, we were all asleep by then. 

He would wake us all up including his wife Irena, line us up, take the belt off his waist, and let us have it just to prove to the family, to remind everybody who is the master of the house. 

I've been asked once before, do I hold it against him that he abused these children, Vicki and me?

And I don't.

I really don't, and the reason is because he was a creature of his culture.

That was a perfectly acceptable behavior in Slovakia, at least in small villages in Slovakia at the time and he just did not know any better.

And the fact that he was brave enough to agree to take the risk of sheltering Vicki and me in saving our life, I cut him a lot of slack for that.

So no, I don't hold it against him at all.

Bill Benson: And Arye, of course once your parents and the other couple took you and Vicki up to the Miernis, and they took you in, your parents then returned to hide in the bell tower of the church.

Despite the priest's efforts to protect your parents, they were not safe there for long.

Tell us about the conditions for them in the bell tower and then who came to their rescue, and how they were discovered.

Arye Ephrath: They went back down to the church and the priest put them in the bell tower.

The bell tower was open to the elements of course because of the bell.

There was a small alcove in there with straw on the floor and that's where they hid.

They were a little worried about that it was already the fall of 1944.

Winter was coming, winters in Europe are very harsh and as I said, the bell tower was open to the elements. 

But for the time being it was a perfect place to hide.

Once a day in the evening, the priest would climb up the ladder, bring them food, bring them water, take down the bucket that they had there to use as a bathroom.

And they would go to sleep there.

And during the day of course they were supposed to be very quiet so as not to give their hiding place away.

And they were that went on for a few weeks, let's say maybe three weeks, and then one night, right after the priest had left, a strange man came up the ladder and scared the daylight of course out of them and he said, "Just like I thought, there are Jews hiding there."

His name was Ján also. Ján Galko. 

Turns out that he was the driver of the priest's carriage.

The village had given the priest a horse-drawn carriage so he can get around and a person to drive the carriage and take care of the horse, and Ján Galko was that person.

He said that there is a rumor in the village that there are Jews hiding up in the church, and there is a rumor in the village that says that somebody had already notified the authorities to the village to search the church.

And so he said to my parents and to the Schöndorfs, "If I were you, I would not stay here."

Now they didn't know who he was, and they didn't know whether he was telling the truth,and they didn't know -- it could have been a trap to get them out in the open. 

But they didn't have much of a choice. 

They said to him, "And what else would you suggest we do? We have no other place to hide."  

He said, "You come to my home and I will hide you." 

And so they walked with him, this is the middle of the night they walked with him.

He lived in a small hut, the very, very last hut at the edge of Šišov with his wife Pavela and their four children. 

The whole hut inside is one room.

In one corner there is a stove and that is the kitchen, in another corner there are a couple of mattresses on the floor and that's a bedroom.

Bill Benson: What do you think motivated them to hide the adults, and how could they manage that?

Arye Ephrath: They insisted that they wanted to hide us.

My parents realized this might not work.

Those people clearly had a very difficult time feeding themselves and the children, never mind feeding four more adults. 

They didn't have room for four more adults.

So my parents said to them, "We really appreciate your hospitality and your offer but we don't see how this is going to work here, so we will find ourselves another place to hide and thank you very much." 

And they were turning to leave.

And at that point Pavela, the wife, Ján Galko's wife who to this point did not say anything, at this point she burst into tears and my father suspected that he might have insulted her in some way by turning down her hospitality or undervaluing her accommodations. 

"No, no," she said. "No, that is not it."

She said, "I'm a good Christian I've been a good Catholic all my life and I have always tried to do what I thought Jesus wanted me to do. 

Jesus here gives me an opportunity to save the lives of four strangers and you are trying to deprive me of that opportunity."

And so they didn't have any counter argument and they stayed there.

The next day Ján and one of his sons dug a shallow ditch under the haystack that he had in his yard for the horse, to feed the horse.

They dug a ditch under the haystack, covered it with a couple of pieces of lumber, and the four people, the four adults, the Schöndorfs and my parents, went into that ditch.

Much later my father told me there was not enough room there for them to lie side by side.

They had to lie like sardines, one person's head against the other person's feet. 

When one person needed to turn over, everybody needed to turn over.

And that's where they stayed for the next eight months until the war ended in Slovakia in April of 1945.

Bill Benson: And during that time I'm assuming that they probably, because they had to get out of there to get food and relieve themselves, so that's probably all under the cover of darkness.

Arye Ephrath: They were allowed out of the -- they called it their bunker.

They were allowed out of the bunker once a day in the evening after darkness to stretch, to use the bathroom, to eat, and then afterward they had to go back into the bunker and to spend the night there.

Bill Benson: Arye, as you mentioned earlier when the families first went to Šišov, there was a feeling the war wouldn't last too much longer and then it ended up lasting of course until the spring of 1945 when the Soviet Red Army drove German forces out of Slovakia right around the time of your third birthday.

Tell us what you can about your liberation and then about being reunited with your parents.

Arye Ephrath: My parents of course came over for me at the end of the war.

I consider my life up to that point to be bookended on each side by significant events. 

The day I was born was the day of the first transport from Bardejov to Auschwitz. 

The day I turned three in 1945 was the day the Red Army liberated Slovakia.

My parents came for me and I didn't recognize them.

I didn't know them as my parents.

To me, Irena and Ján were my papa and my mama, I didn't know who those people were.  

And it took us a while to get to know each other and to become a family again.

Bill Benson: Arye, I have just one more question for you today, and that is: as we face rising antisemitism, related conspiracy theories, and Holocaust denial, please tell us what we can learn from what you experienced during the Holocaust.

Arye Ephrath: There is a saying. 

It says that if we don't learn from history we are bound to repeat it. 

My own view is that there is no if about it. 

The human race does not have a good record of learning from history.

We fought a terrible war in World War I. 

There were millions and millions of casualties.

This was proclaimed  to be the war to end all wars, and 20 years later, we fought an even more terrible war.

And not too many years after that, after America had spent both treasure and blood in Europe with the Allies to defeat fascism in Europe not many years after that, we have seen Americans on American soil marching under the swastika banner.

I am afraid, very afraid that -- we don't, the human race -- if we don't learn to learn from our history, we will repeat it.

On the other hand, when my parents came to Šišov with the Schöndorfs, they dealt there with three parties.

They dealt with the priest, they dealt with the Miernis, and they dealt with the Galkos.

And all three of them were very gracious and courageous in offering help.

Now if I had a bag full of coins, and I put my hand into that bag and pulled out three random coins and found out that all three are gold, I would not come to the conclusion that I am unbelievably lucky to have found, by random choice, the only three gold coins in that bag. 

I would come to the conclusion that it's very likely that the bag is full of gold coins, maybe all the coins in the bag are gold

I don't think that my parents were extremely, outstandingly lucky to have found the only three parties in Šišov who were courageous and compassionate and decent and humane.

It's much more likely that had they met three other parties, probably they would have behaved the same way. 

And there is nothing to make Šišov different from any other place on Earth.

If that is true about the good people of Šišov that many of them would have behaved the same way as the Galkos and the Miernis and the priest, then that must also be true about many people elsewhere. 

In fact there were hundreds, if not thousands, of non-Jews in Europe who risked, and sometimes sacrificed, their lives to save Jews from annihilation.

And so the thought that there are such people who fulfill the Holocaust Museum's motto which is, "What You Do Matters," that gives me a lot of hope.

Bill Benson: Thank you so much.

I think that everything you've shared today gives us all hope even under the most horrifying and difficult of circumstances. 

Thank you for being our First Person today, Arye.

I wish we had had more time, but thank you for all that you've shared with us today.

Arye Ephrath: Thank you very much for having me, and thank you very much to the Holocaust Museum for organizing this program.