Helena Karafová

* 1922

  • “I was born in Slovakia, my dad was a bricklayer, he always brought something, that’s what we lived off, that’s how it was, and where there were a lot of children, there was poverty. When the war began I was eighteen, and my dad said it was time for us to start fighting because there was great poverty, there wasn’t even bread, so we took our things and went into the mountains. My father had weapons and I acted as messenger, we couldn’t go back to our homes, we were there like animals, we slept there in the rocks, it was terrible.”

  • “When a train came up that big hill, with the Jews, they opened the doors and they fell out, and the SS men were ready, they shot at everyone, but they didn’t manage to kill them all. My dad pulled one boy out and saved his life, he was twelve years old, and his parents, not that they were sending them to concentration camps or to the gas chambers, there was a lime quarry in Banská Štiavnica, and they threw them into it alive. They were Jews mostly, and then those who were snitched on for fighting against Hitler, they went there, whole families with children. When you speak about it, how it was, it’s almost impossible to imagine that it’s true; but it is true, that’s how it was.”

  • “There were more of us living in those holes in the mountains, it was our home. We were going out when it was possible, depending on the movement of the front. I even got home to see my mom. I was lucky that nobody turned me in. When SS men were walking through the village and investigating, nobody knew anything.”

  • “My dad took one twelve-year-old boy in his arms and hid him in the shepherd’s place, because many shepherds with sheep were living in the region. The boy stayed there until the end of the war. He would affectionately call me ´sister´ after the war. He later completed his studies. He has been saved this way.”

  • “The mountains there were higher than those in Karlovy Vary! When a train was passing by, and you know what kind of trains were in use at that time, it went very slowly just as some crawling bug, and it was full of Jews. And my father or other partisans would go there and tear out the rails so that they would be able to throw the kids out to the forest. And those children got saved, they did not shoot them. Dad said: ´I don’t know how it’s possible, but I haven’t been hit by a single bullet.´ There were so many of these Jewish children!”

  • “It’s a big rock, and it has something like cellars dug inside it, and it’s quite pleasantly warm in the rock. The door was masked by trees say, and no one knew something was there; unless they’d been there, they couldn’t find it. It was masked like the forest, the entrance was. There were various things inside, duvets, to keep warm, we even survived a bit of winter there. It was terrible, you can’t imagine what a person can survive.”

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„We lived in holes and they never found us.“

With her husband
With her husband
zdroj: archiv pamětníka

Helena Karafová, born on September 11, 1922, comes from Levice in Slovakia. She grew up as the middle child of three sisters in a family of a mason. Following the declaration of the Slovak State, her father decided that he and Helena would join the resistance movement. After some time, they went to the mountains in the vicinity of Banská Štiavnica, where the Slovak - and later Russian - partisans operated. She was organizing the delivery of food to them and taking care of the wounded. Helena‘s fiancée had to join the Nazi army, but he deserted while in Italy and joined the partisans. He was seriously wounded there but survived and returned home to Slovakia. After the war, they married and moved to Prague, where Helena lives today.