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That was less than two weeks away.
Voices erupted. Everyone—the rabbi, the priest, the tobacconist, farmers, customers, unmarried girls—began speaking at once, questioning the crier, the police, the guards, and each other.
—What kind of work? What if they get married in the next two weeks? Where are they going? How should they dress? What should they bring?
It was a cacophony of muddled speculation mingled with outrage and worry. This ordinance had nothing to do with pets or jewelry or shopping. It made no sense. Why would the government want their girls? Lea slipped her arm around Edith. Margie Becker looked up at Zena Haber and shrugged. What else could they do? Helena Citron stopped playing with Aviva and looked over at her married elder sister, Ruzinka. Adela and Debora Gross clasped hands.
THE LARGEST AND WEALTHIEST TOWN in the eastern region of Slovakia is Prešov, just seventy kilometers west of where the Friedman girls and their friends were standing, gobsmacked by the announcement that would change their young lives. With the largest Jewish population in the region dating back to the early 1600s, Prešov was home to the Great Synagogue, near the town center. The building was deceptively austere on the outside but rivaled the city’s Gothic cathedral, the Roman Catholic church of St. Michuláša, in size. Amid silver firs and European black pines, the cathedral’s spires punctured the sky above the city square next to a fountain that commemorated the day Jews were allowed to live within the city walls, over one hundred years earlier. A gift from Marcus Holländer, the first Jew to settle within the city gates, the Neptune Fountain had been given a place of honor and had become a popular meeting place for young Jews and gentiles. No more. Once, sixteen-year-old Magda Amster had loved to sit in reverie by the flowing waters of the fountain where she could meet her best friend, Sara Shpira. Now, the park and even the city center were off-limits to Jews, and Magda’s best friend had moved to Palestine.
Magda Amster in Presov, circa 1940.
PHOTO COURTESY BENJAMIN GREENMAN FAMILY.
TODAY, AT THE TOP of Hlavná Street, which is still the main artery into the city square, there is a busy intersection of four-lane traffic and a complicated array of traffic lights. In the 1940s, this corner was the site of the marketplace, where horses pulling sleds or carts for the vendors trotted past Jews and gentiles alike. Trying to find some remnant of the past, the daughter of Marta F. points to the busy roadway. Now there is a crosswalk instead of the house where her mother once lived with her large extended family. In a faded black-and-white photo, Marta F., age thirteen or fourteen, stands in the snow looking up a narrow alleyway. It looks strikingly similar to today’s Okružná Street, which still leads to the Jewish center of Prešov. Smiling shyly at the camera, Marta is wearing her Sabbath best and looks as if she might be heading to synagogue.
It is confusing to meander the streets of Prešov’s old Jewish section today. A dilapidated wall, tagged by Slovak graffiti artists, has four rows of barbed wire secured to rusted metal posts along the top edge. Inside the enclosure, there appear to be mostly derelict buildings with peeling paint and wired-up windows. It is hard to imagine that this complex once embraced three synagogues, a children’s school, a “playing field for children,” a kosher butcher, and a bathhouse. As the daughters of Marta F. and Ida Eigerman wander the courtyard, we find the synagogue’s caretaker’s house and knock on his door. A solidly built, gentle-faced man answers the door. Peter Chudý has deep sorrowful eyes and speaks very little English. Orna explains in rudimentary Slovakian that their mothers were from Prešov and on the first transport.
“So was mine!” he blurts. Moments later we are in his home and looking at a photograph of Klara Lustbader, with her hair in braids and wearing a school uniform. The picture is from a class photo with Magda Amster.
Moments later Chudý has granted us private access to the Great Synagogue—concrete proof of a vital Jewish community that once lived and worshipped in Prešov. Inside, this large two-story building, with its two towers, is breathtakingly beautiful. Under a powder blue vaulted ceiling with an intricately painted border of geometrical and abstract Moorish designs, an elaborate brass candelabra hangs. Ornate starbursts and gold Jewish stars look down on worshippers sitting in the women’s balcony. On the main floor, the men prayed before an elegant two-story Aron Hakodesh or Torah Ark.
This is the oldest Jewish museum in the country, and tourists who visit the Great Synagogue can find display cases from the Bárkány Collection, artifacts of the medieval Jewish diaspora, upstairs in the women’s section. This is where Giora Shpira stood at the Bimah (Sacral Desk) and read the Torah for his bar mitzvah, where Orna Tuckman’s mother, Marta, may have worshipped in the women’s balcony alongside Ida Eigerman and Gizzy Glattstein, Joan Rosner, Magda Amster and about 225 other young women about to be deported from Prešov.
There is also a book listing the names of Prešov families who did not survive the Holocaust. Looking through the pages, Orna Tuckman stands with her face reflected in the glass case below the Jewish star. “This makes it real,” she says when she finds her grandparents’ names and attempts to squeeze back the tears. “They existed.”
BEING FROM AN UPPER-CLASS FAMILY, Magda Amster was not the kind of girl who had to do the food shopping on market days. Market day was still a vital social occasion, though, and after the blizzard, everyone would have been a little stir-crazy and anxious to get outside. Disarmingly happy, her delicate cheeks pale pink from the cold and her long neck swathed in a handknitted scarf, Magda Amster headed down the hill from her home to meet up with Klara Lustbader and a few other girls she had known at school.
Now that no Jew over the age of fourteen could attend school, market day was one of the few occasions that boys and girls could meet each other without too many adults chaperoning their conversations. Giora Shpira, the fourteen-year-old brother of Magda’s best friend, Sara, was a scholarly lad who enjoyed Magda’s company because she treated him like a kid brother. Giora’s black-rimmed glasses circled bright, intelligent eyes, but without the structure of formal education anymore, Giora and his younger brother, Schmuel, spent much of their time studying at home or doing odd jobs, trying to avoid mischief. The boys knew how smart each girl was and which studies she excelled at. They knew their families and siblings, and had grown up playing tag with these girls now hurrying toward adulthood.
In the Jewish square outside the Great Synagogue, Neolog (or reform Jews) and Orthodox men, plus Hasidim, who should have been making their way slowly across the icy cobbles to begin Minchah (afternoon prayers), were conversing about the rumor. There had been no formal announcement in Prešov, yet. And while news travels fast, it did not travel so fast that one town knew what was happening in another on the same day. In eastern Slovakia, news was dependent on town criers.
Not far from the town center, the Jewish section of Prešov was in a slight dell, protected from the mountain wind. A few junior members of the Great Synagogue had already headed toward the town hall to see if there would be any announcements. Giora and Schmuel had the same idea, and passed the men hurrying toward the square.
It was hard to believe that just a few months earlier, Giora had been bar mitzvahed in the grand, two-story edifice and had celebrated his coming of age at Magda Amster’s home with forty of his best friends and schoolmates—girls and boys. The Amster family was always generous, and the bond between Giora’s parents and Magda’s was all the more devoted because of their daughters’ close friendship. Now, these same girls were being threatened by the rumor of government service. Giora felt both protective and alarmed as he and his brother hurried toward Hlavná Street, past Gizzy Glattstein’s corset shop where a Polish refugee, Ida Eigerman, had found employment.
Having fled Poland in 1940, Ida had left her family behind in the town of Nowy Scz, where there was now a ghetto. Ida had first hidden near the Polish border, in Bardejov. There she lived with her uncle and worked in his kosher butcher shop. On Kláštorská Street, across from the kosher butcher, was the Bikur Cholim synagogue. In the women’s gallery upstairs, Ida probably sat near Rena Kornreich, who was hiding at her own uncle’s home around the corner. The two Polish refugees certainly knew each other before Rena moved to Humenné. Ida Eigerman had apple cheeks and smooth black hair that she curled back off her forehead. Her days were spent measuring the middle-class and upper-class Jewish women of Prešov for girdles and other undergarments.
Past the corset shop, down the hill toward the cathedral where the statue of Neptune stood, Magda Amster may have been pondering her young life on the edge of the city square—where Jews were no longer allowed. She missed going to school, missed having a cat. Most of all, she missed Giora Shpira’s sister, Sara. Sara had been so determined to go to Palestine that she went on a hunger strike when her father refused to let her leave. Magda didn’t have the chutzpah to starve herself or defy her own father’s wishes and had been left behind. Magda’s elder sister and brother had already left for Palestine, and Magda understood that her father wanted at least one daughter to stay home—as the youngest, she understood that was her duty. Still, she pined for the company of her best friend and siblings. In a few years when she was older, her father had promised, she could visit Palestine. But a few years is a lifetime to a teenager. The wind whipped her face and made her eyes tear. The only reason to smile was the sight of her friends Giora and Schmuel racing down the hill toward her, waving a letter. The wind tried to snatch the thin sheets as they passed the missive into Magda’s gloved hands, but she held on tightly to Sara’s latest letter home:
It’s simply beautiful to live. The world is so perfect. Quiet in its happiness, in which it rejoices and with which it enriches so much. I gain satisfaction in my work, and every limb sings its songs. After a few days of rain, the skies are happy again, blue and deep, above the gray houses. Suddenly, there are vegetables, flowers of every color, and maidenhair ferns appear among the rocks. Everything is refreshed, satisfied, spring-like, and I am also happy and I love to be alive!
It was a moment of reverie shattered by the drumbeat of Prešov’s town crier, announcing the same news that Edith and her friends were hearing in Humenné. Members of the Prešov Jewish community hurried back to the synagogue to report to the elders as the teenagers pressed through the crowd to read the notice being slapped up on the side of town hall and slathered with glue. All over Slovakia, the same notices were being posted and simultaneously heralded by town criers clanging brass bells or banging drums. The only variable between communities was where the girls should go: firehouse, school, mayor’s office, bus stop. The rest of the news was the same:
All unmarried girls between the ages of sixteen and thirty-six must register . . . on March 20 for a health examination in order to commit to three months of government work service. Each girl should bring no more than forty kilos of her belongings to the school on the day of registration.
“Why take girls?” Giora Shpira asked.
It was a question he would ask for the rest of his life.
Chapter Three
Why does Herodotus begin his great description of the
world with what is, according to the Persian Sages, a triv-
ial matter of tit-for-tat kidnappings of young women?
—RYSZARD KAPUCISKI
FRIDAY, MARCH 13, 1942
THE DOUR, GRAY, COLUMNED BUILDING of the Department of Finance sat on the corner opposite of one of Bratislava’s most beautiful buildings. Erected in 1890, the art nouveau edifice, designed by the Austrian architect Josef Rittner, housed the Ministry of the Interior under President Jozef Tiso in the 1940s. Originally meant to serve the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s army, it was where the wheels of the National Slovak Party’s government turned. Looking out over the banks of the Danube, decorated with ancient Roman helmets on the four corners of its many domes and arches, it was a tribute to the empire’s rich and ornate past. The Department of Finance was housed in a more minimalist structure, with a dash of 1920s deco. Sandwiched between these two incongruous structures, the Franz Joseph Bridge stretched across the Danube.
Today, you can still see fishermen sitting along the banks next to small fires smoldering in the river’s fog, while trolleys jangle past on the streets above. Some things have changed. The Department of Finance is now the Ministry of the Interior. There is a shopping mall down the street and a four-lane highway. But the same wide stairway leads up to thirty-foot-high wood-hewn doors with brass knobs the size of a giant’s paw. Inside, just to the right of the marble foyer, a paternoster elevator has moved on its continuous conveyor belt of bureaucratic efficiency since it was installed in the 1940s. This doorless elevator never pauses its incessant cycle of moving cubicles. Like the “Our Father” prayer it was named for, it moves as seamlessly as rosary beads in one’s hand. Not that it helps to pray before you get in. People have lost lives and limbs in these human filing cabinets, but it was the conveyance of the time. And this paternoster is one of the few of its kind remaining in Europe.
Minister of Transportation and Chief of the Jewish Department Dr. Gejza Konka would have mastered the technique of stepping onto the rising shelf as it moved past, and been used to the sound of wood creaking, objecting to his weight as it carried him upstairs to where the Minister of Finance was busily calculating the costs of rehoming Jews.
As Chief of the Jewish Department, a department he helped create with the fascist Minister of the Interior Alexander Mach in the summer of 1941, Konka was responsible not only for devising the plan that would deport the girls, but for organizing the transports with the railway. Since financing and cost-effectiveness was not his department and since there were costs that needed to be considered (food, lodging, guards, fuel), he would have made frequent visits to the Minister of Finance. The Slovak government was paying the Nazis 500 reichsmark (the equivalent of $200 U.S. today) to “rehome” their Jews in Poland. The euphemism for “rehoming,” defined at the Wannsee Conference, was “evacuate.” The meaning of both terms was the same. In fact, on an order for Zyklon B (the gas used to execute Jews and other “undesirables”), the actual terminology used to request five tons of the gas was “materials for Jewish resettlement.”
In 1941, after the Slovaks had agreed to German demands to send twenty thousand Slovak workers, Izidor Koso, head of President Tiso and Interior Minister Mach’s chancelleries, suggested that the Germans take Jews instead. The scheme to collect twenty thousand able-bodied “persons” between the ages of eighteen and thirty-six to construct buildings for Jews who would be “permanently resettled” in Poland originally began in 1941. However, knowing they couldn’t supply the Germans with the numbers required, Koso lowered the age to sixteen. That the first five thousand of those able-bodied persons should all be young women was never stipulated in any of the paperwork. It was at the Wannsee Conference, held on January 20, 1942, that “an organizational task unparalleled in history” was clearly outlined by the Deputy/Acting Reich-Protector, SS Reinhard Heydrich, and his then assistant, Adolf Eichmann. In a dramatization of the partial transcripts taken during the Wannsee Conference, Schutzstaffel (SS) men and politicians sit around a large oak table discussing the destruction of European Jewry, outlining the Final Solution with a callous lack of emotion. Among the euphemisms bandied about was the “opportunity” the Jews were being given to “work”—that is, be worked—to death. It was for this “opportunity” that Edith and her friends were about to register.
The meetings leading up to the fateful decision to deport unmarried Jewish girls were probably conducted behind closed doors and without a stenographer. Who instigated this idea? Did it come from Adolf Hitler and Hermann Goering, or Heinrich Himmler? All we can be sure of is that the usual suspects devising the plan in Slovakia would have included SS Captain Dieter Wisliceny; Alexander Mach, former head of the Hlinka Guard and now Minister of the Interior; Prime Minister Vojtech Tuka; Izidor Koso; and others. We do not find Dr. Gejza Konka among this eminent group of fascists. A steely-faced, bald headed man with hard eyes, Konka does not appear to be in any of the group photographs taken during this period, nor is he regularly written about. But his name slips in and out of the historic record and appears on enough documents to make him an important question mark.
Everyone in attendance at these closed-door meetings would have agreed that the Aryanization of Slovakia was of paramount importance, but there were a few obstacles standing in the Slovak National Party’s way: the law and the Vatican.
First and foremost, it was illegal to deport Jewish citizens because they were still considered citizens. The Slovak assembly needed to pass legislation making it legal, but a bill had not yet been brought up for debate. The announcement was for girls to report for duty. They were not being deported; they were being given the “opportunity” to work for the government. Of course, none of the men concocting this covert plan were overly concerned about the rule of law. For Alexander Mach, the vote was a mere formality. By the time the measure was finally passed, more than five thousand girls and a few thousand young men would already be in Auschwitz. There was a reason the Slovak government was referred to as a “puppet state” of Germany’s Third Reich.
While changing the law was a hindrance, the Vatican’s objection to the deportation of Jews was far more problematic. Much to the dismay of both the Slovak and German governments, the plan to send Jews to work camps had been leaked in November 1941. In direct response, Pope Pius XII immediately dispatched an emissary, Luigi Maglione, to meet with Slovak ministers and deliver the Holy See’s message that the Jewish citizens of Slovakia should not be forced into work camps, because “it is unchristian.”
