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Wetzler emerged from a camp nobody had heard of in southern Poland to warn of mass exterminations involving the use of gas chambers and crematoria. The two men’s detailed report on Auschwitz-Birkenau, complete with graphic illustrations, wasn’t widely circulated for some time and many didn’t credit it even then – although from then on, people became far more suspicious and avoided transports East at all costs.
    Priska and Tibor couldn’t allow themselves to believe the tales, which seemed too far-fetched to be credible. The general feeling among their friends was that such stories were either the ramblings of men driven insane by imprisonment, or exaggerated as anti-Nazi propaganda. In spite of all they’d endured, it was beyond their comprehension that Hitler really meant what he said when he’d promised to eradicate every human being of undesirable ethnic origin in order to create a master race. The Germans were, after all, one of the world’s most cultured and civilised peoples. The nation that had produced Bach and Goethe, Mozart and Beethoven, Einstein, Nietzsche and Dürer couldn’t possibly create such a monstrous plan – could it?
    Maintaining their hopes of an imminent resolution to a war they didn’t fully understand, the couple carried on with their lives as best they could. In the middle of June 1944, a week before their third wedding anniversary, Priska and Tibor decided to try again for a child. Two months later the relative calm they’d enjoyed for almost two years was shattered by the Slovak National Uprising, anarmed insurrection intended to overthrow the puppet state. Priska’s brother Janko was one of thousands of ordinary citizens and partisans who did their utmost to end the fascist regime under which they were forced to live.
    The violent rebellion began in the Low Tatras on 29 August 1944, and quickly spread until German Wehrmacht forces were sent in two months later to viciously crush it. Thousands died. After that, everything changed. The soldiers who’d been sent to wreak revenge quickly occupied the whole country under the auspices of the Gestapo, who moved in to impose order on those who’d dared disobey the Führer. One of the first tasks of the security police they brought with them was to force President Tiso to resume the transportations of the remainder of the Slovak Jews. Desperate to avoid such a fate, thousands went into hiding or fled to Hungary or other countries where they hoped they might be safer.
    Trying to remain optimistic in the face of what seemed an increasingly inevitable outcome, Priska and her husband chose to stay in Bratislava where they’d successfully managed to avoid capture for so long. Each day they went undiscovered felt like a gift, especially when each week brought more good news about the war. Paris had been liberated, along with key ports in France and Belgium. The Allies had begun an airborne assault on Holland. Surely Germany would capitulate soon?
    On Tuesday, 26 September 1944, the couple celebrated Tibor’s thirtieth birthday. It happened to fall that year on Yom Kippur, the ‘Sabbath of Sabbaths’, a twenty-five-hour period of fasting for the Day of Atonement and the most holy of Jewish observances. Having scrubbed their hands, as was their custom, they sat together and enjoyed a meal cobbled together from whatever was available. They were not only celebrating Tibor’s birthday but the new life Priska had been carrying beneath her heart for a little more than eight weeks. Together they prayed that this, their fourth baby, might survive.
    Two days later, their hopes for happiness were shattered whenthree members of the Freiwillige Schutzstaffel (Volunteer SS) – largely comprised of Slovak ethnic German paramilitaries – burst into their apartment and ordered them to pack their belongings into two small suitcases, together weighing no more than fifty kilograms.
    ‘They were horrible,’ Priska said. ‘They were arrogant. They hardly