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sister Anna had been helped by Gentile friends to escape to the relative safety of the High Tatra Mountains, where she worked as a waitress under her assumed name and lived with their mother’s brother, Dr Gejza Friedman, a pulmonology specialist at a sanatorium for sufferers from tuberculosis. He also took in his eighty-three-year-old father David Friedman, Priska’s grandfather, who’d been left alone after her parents were taken. Anna’s son Otto, aged eleven, was hidden by Catholic nuns. Her oldest brotherBandi was safe in Mandatory Palestine. Janko had defected from his Jewish work unit and joined the partisans to organise raids on the Hlinka Guards and take part in actions aimed at undermining the pro-German government. They had not heard from him in months.
    Rekindling her early interest in Christianity, Priska was baptised into the evangelical faith in the hope that it might save her. Tibor, who’d been raised in a more observant Jewish household, didn’t believe it would. Both of them continued to observe the basic Jewish traditions. In spite of the huge uncertainty surrounding them – or perhaps because of it – his wife became pregnant again, but miscarried this infant as well.
    By the autumn of 1942, the transports East had been halted by the Slovak authorities. The political and religious elite and the Jewish underground had formed an organisation called the Bratislava Working Group, which placed enormous pressure on Tiso’s government once they suspected that the majority of the 58,000 Jews it had deported had been sent to their death. More than 7,000 of them were children.
    For the next two years, after the Slovak government reconsidered its position and refused to deport its remaining 24,000 Jews, those left behind remained relatively safe. There were frantic efforts by the Working Group to save the Jews for ever by bribing key figures in the regime. They even negotiated directly with the SS and with Hauptsturmführer Dieter Wislieceny, the Nazis’ Slovak advisor on Jewish affairs, offering millions of Reichs marks worth of gold. Called the ‘Europa Plan’, these negotiations stalled when Wislieceny was transferred. In the interim, though, they had created an easing of anti-Semitic laws and a reduction in persecution, although a sense of foreboding still pervaded.
    Thanks to Tibor’s job and Priska’s tutoring, they were able to return to Bratislava and moved into an apartment in Edlova Strasse. Although they experienced rationing and restrictions on when and where they could shop, they were well fed compared with thousandsacross Europe. Whenever Priska’s sweet tooth tormented her they would share a cake at their new favourite coffee house, the historic Štefánka Café.
    Like most of their friends, Jewish and Gentile, they tried not to worry too much about the future and pinned their hopes on the war ending soon. By 1943, it certainly seemed to be swinging in favour of the Allies. The few radios allowed reported that there had been successful uprisings in Poland and that the Red Army was slowly taking control. The Germans had lost Stalingrad after a brutal five-month campaign. The Allies had seized Libya, forcing the Afrika Korps to surrender. Italy had declared war on Germany and Berlin was being evacuated of civilians. Could there be an end in sight, they wondered, or would the situation only worsen?

    Priska and Tibor in Bratislava 1943
    No one knew. Nor did they know what had happened to their loved ones, from whom they heard nothing. Rumours had been circulating in Bratislava for months about the camps Jews and others were sent to as word occasionally came back from some of the transports. People were being worked or starved to death or executed in brutal ways, it was said. News reports from America and Britain in 1942 claimed that Jews especially were being methodically murdered. These stories became wilder still after April 1944, when the Slovak prisoner Rudolf Vrba and escapee Alfred