On Wednesday, May 11, DU hosted an event to remember the brutal history of the Holocaust. Speaker and Holocaust survivor, Osi Sladek, gave a presentation about his experience living through the Holocaust. The presentation was held in Margery Reed’s Reiman Theater in front of roughly 30 people.
Sladek’s theme throughout the presentation was one of gratitude for the angels that guided him through the difficulties of the time period. He stressed the importance of learning about our dark history, but he celebrated the victories. He emphasized that although “every human is half good and half bad,” the good won in the end.
Sladek talked about the psychological tricks and cunning plans the Germans employed to dominate the region. He said that, “everything the Nazis did had to be done just perfectly. It was carefully planned out, not something that happened overnight.”
Sladek started his presentation by describing his unique childhood. Growing up in 1942, he was chastised by his schoolmate because he wore a yellow star every day to symbolize that his family was Jewish. When the other kids asked their parents about it they were told to not associate with him. Kids called him a “stinking Jew” and told him to “go back to Palestine.” When he talked to his parents about the issue, they responded by saying “I’m sorry, but we can’t talk to your teachers about this. We’ve lost our rights.”
During this time, young Slovakian Jews were told that they were being given a factory job in Germany to help manufacture ammunitions for the German army. Instead, they were enslaved immediately upon arrival to the factories. They worked 18 hours a day and received poor medical treatment and insufficient nutrition. Despite the brutality, they were instructed to send their parents postcards saying that they loved their jobs and had been well taken care.
Sladak went on to tell stories of his experience as a young boy. Because of tight censorship at the time, Sladek’s family had no idea that Jews were starving and living in ghettos in Poland. One day, a German soldier came to the shop and advised them to go into hiding. Two other people who came into the store offered to hide the family in their homes if needed, even though it was illegal to do so.
Sladek’s parents payed for a smuggler to take him from his home in the Czech Republic to Hungary. After days of trekking in the snow, the smuggler stopped at the border and said to the young Sladek, “See those trees over there? Pretend you’re a bunny rabbit and hop on all fours until I come for you.” He heard men speaking Hungarian and the noise of gunshots; he knew he and the smuggler had arrived safely in Hungary.
His teachers had grown up telling him that “the border is a place with a fence or wall that you need to get through,” so he was amazed at how easily he was able to cross. The smuggler told him that it was only easy because he “knew the path to go on to avoid those complications and that was why your parents paid me so much.”
Once he crossed the border, Sladek was interrogated by the Hungarian police for a day before he was adopted on the spot by extended family. Although an important part of the Jewish faith is to never tell lies, he told the police, “I walked for days and ran and ran until I came in [this] morning” so that he would avoid being sent back to Slovakia.
He quickly enrolled in a Jewish school and felt a sense of normality and the ability to be a kid until he heard a radio announcement that “there [would] be a parade in the center of our city to welcome our friends, the German army, into town!” Sladek told his aunt and uncle that they should immediately go into hiding because the German army were going to invade, but they didn’t listen to him. He remembered thinking that although “they may have been adults they were stupid.” He sent a message to his parents through a smuggler telling them that he was going back to Slovakia. His parents received his message, and Sladek crossed the border again in the middle of a hay basket in a wagon.
When Sladek arrived at his parent’s house, he discovered that they had acquired new baptismal birth certificates (so that they were now Christians) and were going to get new jobs and move further into the country near the Tatra Mountains. However, there was a military rebellion against the Nazis around Central Slovakia and they were told that “if they don’t vacate, [the Nazis] would destroy the entire city” so the family moved to a cabin in the mountains with 15 other Jews where his job was to sweep footprints on the snow after people used the restroom so the Germans couldn’t track them. His family was eventually saved by the Russian army, and while his parents moved to South America, Sladek calls the U.S. his home.
After the presentation, a Jewish prayer was recited to honor and remember the victims of the Holocaust, and a student played a violin piece.
Sladek will continue to live in the U.S. and speak to middle schools, high schools and other organizations about his story.
