Lydia Sternová

* 1929

  • “We started to help people flee to Israel. This was, of course, a very risky undertaking under the Communists. One family that was caught in the attempt to illegally cross the border revealed our network. After they got caught they told the StB everything. It was a family with two kids. Their family name was Kalininovi. The StB arrested 12 people - including me - and they expelled the Israeli ambassador from the country. At first I spent about a month or two in Litoměřice, then they transferred me to Pankrác prison. I was held in custody for nine months – that violates all international conventions – but the Communists obviously didn’t care about it. I suffered a lot. I was interrogated and beaten frequently. From that time on I’m deaf on my left ear because they broke my eardrum. My dear husband embroiled me in it even more, because he was jealous, or wasn’t he? I don’t know. I was sentenced to four years and sat out two and a half. I was released when Gottwald and Stalin died.”

  • “When they took me out of my cell they blindfolded me and told me to stand outside. I was standing there for very long, probably many hours. There was a dog right next to me and I wasn’t allowed to move. They told me that there was a dog keeping an eye on me. He would probably have bitten me if I had moved. Do you know what it’s like to stand there like this with your eyes blindfolded? I was so scared. But they didn’t succeed. They didn’t get anything from me.” “This was in Litoměřice?” “No, it was in the Pankrác prison.”

  • “We had a printing shop selling notebooks, pens, pencil cases and other utensils for school and office. Our “Aryanizer”, who had been an apprentice of my father, needed my mother to help him in the shop, because he wasn’t that much skilful. We lived in the house of president Tiso’s parents. He was born in Bytčec and they had a house there. Tiso’s mother knew my mother and liked her very much. They were peasants and very nice people, not like their son (laughing). I still remember her telling my mother, that she was afraid that her son would be killed one day. That’s what they did after the war, they hanged him. She begged her son to send my mother a “white ID card”. They were giving these to Jewish citizens that were indispensable for the Slovak national economy. In this way we were able to save ourselves for a couple of months. But my mother was helping to hide one of our friends. This was uncovered and we were sent to Sered. But we were lucky because the Jewish community gave Tiso a lot of money in order to prevent the transports from rolling to the concentration camps.”

  • “We didn’t have a lot of information about each other. Everybody had just a certain connection to the next one. There were people who were illegally transferring people across the border but I can’t tell you exactly where. We were just searching for people who wanted to emigrate to Israel and we tried to help each other. A lot of them left. I didn’t know many of the names included in the indictment. We were in touch with Samuel Veselý, as far as I knew. I don’t know what my husband knew. We were trying to guide them across the border. Eventually, they caught that family. They had a little child and they forgot to give him some kind of pill to make it sleep, so it started to cry at the frontier and they caught them.”

  • Celé nahrávky
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    Nes Ciona, Izrael, 02.03.2008

    (audio)
    délka: 43:24
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of 20th Century
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

Me, my mother and my sister spent two years and a half in the Sered camp and I spent another two years in prison, so I’ve seen quite a lot.

Lydia Stern in the early 30s
Lydia Stern in the early 30s
zdroj: archiv pamětnice

Lydia Sternová, née Langová, was born on May 6, 1929, in Slovakia. She had lived in Israel since 1965. She suffered a lot of hardship just like the majority of the immigrants to Israel. She went through many camps and prisons. The detention camp of the so-called „Slovak state“ or jails of Communist Czechoslovakia, where she landed in the fifties (1954) was for helping people emigrate from Czechoslovakia. She spent two and a half years in a detention camp in Sered with her mother and sister were they were imprisoned for another two and a half years. Her whole family, except for her mother and sister, perished in the war. Her father was taken to the Majdanek concentration camp with one of the first transports and shot there. After the war, she got married to Julián Šorban and they organized escapes for Czechoslovak Jews to Israel. The whole organization was, however, uncovered in 1953 and the Israeli ambassador was expelled from Czechoslovakia. Lydia was sentenced to four years. She actually spent two and a half years in prison and her son was taken away from her and placed in a children‘s asylum. It took several months before her mother was allowed to take care of him. After her release from prison, she got divorced and married again. Today, Lydia Sternová lives in the city of Nes Ciona in the south of the Tel Aviv agglomeration, where she moved years ago to be close to her younger son and his family.