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camps would be close to armaments factories within occupied Poland where inmates would work in return for food and shelter. Some were promised work gathering in the harvest or helping to set up new Jewish states.
    Abandoned and helpless, the Slovak Jews resigned themselves to what seemed to be an increasingly bleak fate. They expected harsh conditions and general privations but prayed that once the war was over normal life could resume. Entire families volunteered to go with those sent ahead, thinking it would be better to remain together. Others promised to send money, letters and food parcels, fully believing that these items would reach their intended destination.
    In March 1942, almost nine months to the day after her wedding and around the time that she had hoped to be celebrating the birth of her first child, Priska heard that her eldest sister Boežka had been rounded up in one of the Aktionen after the Slovak authorities agreed to supply 1,000 healthy single women. Learning of Boežka’s fate, Priska hurried to the railway terminal in Bratislava to try to rescue her. It was an act that could very easily have cost her life. She found the crowded passenger train almost ready to depart but could see no sign of her sister amongst the sea of frightened and bewildered faces. ‘I didn’t know any of the gardistas but I begged them to let my sister go. They yelled at me and told me, “If you’re single, get on the train! If you’re married, then go home!” I was surprised they didn’t just leave me (at the station) but they didn’t.’
    The feared Slovak Hlinka Guards in their distinctive black uniforms, many of whom had been trained by the SS, arrested Priska and locked her in jail overnight. Her distraught husband Tibor, who’d had no idea where she was, eventually received a message the following morning: ‘Come and get your wife. She’s a trouble-maker.’ Tibor went to the police station and persuaded the authorities to let him take Priska home without penalty, but he was so angry at what she had risked that he refused to speak to her – although only for half a day, so upset was his young wife that she hadn’t been able to rescue sweet Boežka.
    Not long afterwards, Priska became pregnant again. Once more, even though their lives seemed to be disintegrating around them, the couple were overjoyed. Neither of them fully appreciated thedanger they were in as, during the following weeks, the authorities continued to carry out lightning raids on Jewish homes to round up people for the transports, a thousand at a time. Once, when Priska’s parents heard jackboots in the hallway, they leapt from a window and managed to escape.
    On 17 July 1942, they weren’t so lucky. Powerless against the chain of command that presided over life and death, Emanuel and Paula Rona were snatched without warning. Priska didn’t even know that they’d gone until it was too late. They were in their mid-fifties and she never even had the chance to say goodbye. As with her sister, Priska couldn’t save them. Nor could she save the second baby she then miscarried. ‘I felt then that I should go East too,’ she said. ‘Nothing mattered to me.’
    Tibor discovered that his mother, Berta, had also been transported from her home near Püchov to a camp in Polish Silesia. She was elderly and alone. For all he knew, he was now an orphan. Priska learned from childhood contacts such as Gizka that most of the Jewish population of Zlaté Moravce had vanished too, including friends and relatives.
    It no longer seemed to matter that her parents had been able to give Gizka their most precious things for safekeeping. The best friend whom she’d tutored through high school had risked her life by hiding the family belongings. With her parents and sister gone and her other siblings scattered, though, Priska wondered what a few bone china dishes or silver cutlery would mean after the war if there was no one left to sit at their Sabbath table.
    Her