Exactly 85 years ago, a decree was adopted that restricted the rights of Jews in Slovakia. The Jewish Code created the conditions for their subsequent deportation to Nazi camps. The Day of the Victims of the Holocaust and Racial Violence was commemorated in Bratislava with a symbolic ceremony of laying stones.
The so-called Jewish Code was adopted on September 9, 1941. “It deprived our Jewish fellow citizens of their rights, property and human dignity, gradually excluding them from the society of which they had previously been a natural part. What followed was persecution and the deportation of tens of thousands of people,” said Parliamentary Speaker Richard Raši (Hlas-SD).
Ninety-year-old Denisa also remembers the Holocaust. “My happy childhood ended when I was three. German students came on holiday and threw stones at the Jewish school. The first stone hit my sister in the head, and that marked the end of the school year,” the Holocaust survivor recalled.
Denisa’s family was subsequently forced to hand over all of its property. “We were not allowed to go outside in the evenings. All our neighbours stopped talking to us. The children stopped playing with us. We had to start wearing the yellow star on our coats,” Denisa said.
Her father was taken to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in Germany. “My mother was sentenced to death as a member of the partisan movement and as a spy, and then she was shot in Spišská Nová Ves one month before liberation,” she added.
Approximately 70,000 Slovak Jews were murdered during the Holocaust. “We are not talking only about numbers in history textbooks. We are talking about people. People who had families, professions, friendships, plans and dreams,” Raši said.
“If there is something we have learned from our ancestors, perhaps it is that being Jewish does not only mean surviving your own history. It means having the determination to speak out, even when the injustice does not directly affect us,” said Richard Duda, chairman of the Central Union of Jewish Religious Communities in Slovakia.
A more than 200-year-old Torah scroll was unveiled at Bratislava Castle. “The Torah is something like the Bible for Christians. It has accompanied the lives of our Jewish community for many centuries,” Raši said.
Slovakia has the scroll on loan. The length of the loan has not been specified. It will be kept at Bratislava Castle.
Source: TASR
