Juraj Pollák

* 1924

  • “From August 28th to 29th 1944 there was an outbreak of the Slovak National Uprising. I told my family we had to disappear somewhere, since I already had my previous experiences from Hungary. I was the youngest member of our family, but I also had a sister. She was three years and my brother was eight years older than me. My sister, since she was already married, didn´t live with us anymore. At night I went to ask her whether they´d like to join us, but I couldn´t get inside of their house. They lived in a tall building, that was locked down at the entrance. The time was running and I knew that Germans were going to take over Žilina in the morning. So we all ran away towards the insurgents´ territory. My sister didn´t make it on time. She and her husband died, they were executed. And we skedaddled down to Banská Bystrica.”

  • “One of my friends, having an egg on his face, had to sign up to collaboration. But I knew who he was. I didn´t realized it, but my mom found out and warned me. There were two men monitoring me and I knew them both, so I always passed them some information, so that they met their norm. Although, those were things that couldn´t serve them to reveal anything. It was my intention, since I already had experiences with Gestapo.”

  • “We had a key, but we waited for the right moment of escape. Besides all, they told us a place to go to, if we managed to run away. It was quite near where a taxi was supposed to wait. The underworld was really perfectly organized. The taxi driver was supposed to take us as being instructed what to do next.”

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    Žilina, 25.03.2017

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I was lucky to experience great coincidences to my advantage

With the trophy
With the trophy
zdroj: archív pamätníka

Juraj Pollák was born on July 15, 1924 in Žilina. Since being seven years old he attended the Jewish elementary school, later studied at the middle school. After the Slovak State was established and the so-called Jewish Code was adopted, he wasn´t allowed to study on, thus he got employed as a worker in a mechanical engineering company. The textile shop owned by his father was aryanized. Luckily, the family avoided the first deportations even though they were interned at the concentration centre on Závodná Road in Žilina. At the end of 1943, he joined an underground movement at his workplace, but after their activity got revealed later in 1943, in January 1944 he left to Budapest. Here he stayed in a refugee camp, was imprisoned for some time as well as interrogated by Gestapo, until he ran away from the so-called Kastner´s train and got to Slovakia. From the outbreak of the Slovak National Uprising and occupation of Slovakia by Nazis, until the liberation, was he and his family hiding at various places in mountains of the central Slovakia. After the war he engaged himself in professional motorcycle riding, later he worked as a driving school instructor. In 1968 he emigrated into Austria and later to the USA, although after some time he returned back home. When he came back from emigration, he worked in a car repair shop and later in Mototranse Žilina, where he stayed until his retirement in 1984. In Žilina he has joined many discussions, meetings, and remembrance as well as funeral events related to the Holocaust era.