[In a railway station waiting room, using false IDs] Then we turned & what was there? Five SS were playing cards at the table & above was a wardrobe with rifles & automatic machine guns. Horrible. So we sit down. My mother was holding my hand; she nearly broke my fingers, she was so upset. What now? One of them looked at us. Got up & came to us! Luckily my father hadn’t come in. Because if they suspected him, they’d tear down his trousers” [to check if he was circumcised].

“He came & shouted to my sister, ‘Come here. Closer. Where do you go? Who are you? What are you doing here? What do you want?’ My mother was holding so horrible my hand. Then he said a very important thing. This was the alarm for me. He walked around her, looking from her shoes to the top. He said ‘You are not a Partisan? Hmmm? You are not a Partisan?’ She said “No!” He said ‘You know what we do with Partisans? Puf-Puf!’ He was showing it. Puf-Puf-Puf. This was the signal for me. I jumped immediately. I pulled my hand out of Mum’s hands, went to my sister & started as a crazy person to dance around her & sing “Edita! Ha-ha-ha! Partisan, Buchni ma.’ ‘Buchni ma’ meant ‘hit me’. She understood, because as children, we were fighting. She started to hit me. ‘Stop it! You’ll scare the gentleman!’ In Slovak, you know? I was ‘Ha-ha-ha! Tra-la-la!’ – dancing as crazy. He was looking, walking around again. He didn’t believe it. But then one of them, playing the cards, was screaming, ‘Come here Paul!’ or whatever was the name. “‘Come here! Let the stupid girls there! What are you doing? We want to play!” So, he went, so slowly… this distracted him & my sister could be silent. I played the crazy girl. Horrible. This was the worst thing that happened to me, during the Holocaust. ‘Puf-Puf’.