Born Survivors (44 page)

Priska was comforted to have her most precious belongings returned to her by her childhood friend Gizka, and others. Among them were cherished photographs of her wedding, a few letters from Tibor and images of her lost family. There were her mother’s favourite earrings and a medallion Paula Ronová used to wear on a pretty gold chain, as well as her grandfather’s fob watch and chain.

Deciding to throw herself into her studies, Priska hired a local girl to take care of baby Hana and went back to college to study for her master’s degree in French and English Language. As she had always planned, she became a teacher in Bratislava, at a primary school on Karpatská Street. In 1947, she changed her surname after her school inspector complained that he would ‘break his tongue’ with the name Löwenbeinová. ‘One of my female colleagues decided of her own initiative to tell the inspector that I would change my name to sound more “Slovak”, so that is what I did.’ She liked the French word
l’homme
for a man, and thought Lom with the –ová suffix would be a simple name. She was even more delighted with her choice when a colleague told her that the Czech-born actor Herbert Lom was a famous film star.

Priska raised her child as Hana Lomová and christened her in an evangelical church. Above all, she said, she was determined to give her Hanka a good education. ‘I was her mother, adviser and friend,’ she said. ‘We lived for each other. She did not let me down.’

Hana and Priska in 1949

She remained in Bratislava for five years, by which time she finally accepted that Tibor truly wasn’t coming home. Her sister Anička had married again and lived in the city until her death. Their brother Janko left in 1948 to live in Israel near his brother Bandi. In 1950, Uncle Gejza persuaded Priska to move with him to a new clinic in Prešov in the east of Czechoslovakia where he was the head of the hospital’s pulmonology department. As Hana was a ‘sickly child’ who suffered from serious nosebleeds, adenoid and bowel problems, he felt it was better for her to live in the fresh mountain air with medical care readily available.

Priska became a professor of languages in Prešov where, after several years teaching English, German and French at local high
schools, she established the department of English Literature and Language at the university and was a senior assistant in the philosophy faculty. In 1965, while Hana was away at college in Bratislava, Gezja – her adored uncle Apu – committed suicide, convinced he had lung cancer. He was sixty-five years old. It was Priska who found him in the home they shared, and the discovery almost broke her. Suddenly alone, she moved the four hundred kilometres back to Bratislava to be near her only child.

Hana had first discovered her true religious origins when she was six years old and someone called her ‘a dirty Jew’. She ran home and told her mother, who said, ‘Let me show you pictures of my mother and father, who were Jewish.’ Hana looked at them and said, ‘OK. I want to be a Jew too. Can I go and play now?’ She said she had never been bothered by the issue since. Nor does she tell people that she was born in a concentration camp. ‘It doesn’t really come up.’

As Hana grew, Priska ensured that she knew her incredible story, and she frequently showed her daughter photographs of Tibor and shared his anecdotes and letters. She also had his notebook and his precious stamp collection, which he’d left in the safekeeping of a friend. ‘I wanted her to know about her dad and what we went through, but I wanted her to have nice memories and not think about any bad stuff,’ she said. ‘I wanted her to be close to her father and know how life was … I remember everything and I told her everything.’

Hana described her mother as ‘a spitfire’ who was ‘so adamant’ that she would have her child. For years Hana secretly believed that her father might have survived the camps and would peer hopefully into the face of any tall, blond, blue-eyed man with a moustache she saw. Only in her early twenties did she finally accept that he was dead.

She and her mother remained in touch with Priska’s camp protector Edita, who visited them from her home in Vienna when Hana was nineteen years old. ‘I couldn’t stop hugging her!’ Hana said. Back in 1944, as part of her
mitzvah
or moral duty, Edita had
promised Tibor on the train that she would take care of his pregnant wife. She had hoped that she too might be saved and find a husband one day. Her prayers were answered and – after the war – she married a rabbi. Hana recalled of their visit, ‘Her husband was very reserved and they had two young sons. All she kept saying was how brave my mother was.’

Priska also tried to find the other Edita in her life, Dr Edita Mautnerová, who’d helped her give birth in the Freiberg factory and had been one of those able to escape from the train. ‘We were sorry to learn that she died after the war,’ Hana said. ‘So I was never able to thank her.’ Priska did arrange a reunion with some of the women who’d shared her experiences, including Chava Livni and Priska’s friend Magda, so that Hana could meet them. Hana also met Magda’s husband Martin Gregor, the actor who’d registered her birth in Mauthausen. He told her, ‘You look much better now!’ And she was later to meet someone who’d worked with her father on a newspaper before the war. He said, ‘You’re Tibor’s daughter?’ and then he started to cry because he had such fond memories of him.

Priska shows Hana where the train stopped in Horní Bříza 1960

In 1960, fifteen years after Hana’s birth, Priska took her back to Horní Bříza to personally thank its people for what they had done for the prisoners on the train. Mr Pavliček had passed away, but they spoke to many who remembered him fondly. They laid stones on the site near the railway tracks where thirty-eight bodies from the transport had first been buried, and visited the town graveyard where they’d been reinterred. They learned that in November 1945, the Soviets had taken several SS officers to the town and made them exhume the decomposing corpses with their bare hands. The teenage boys Jaroslav Lang and Vaclav Stepanek had watched, along with many of the townspeople. ‘It was good for us to see that,’ said Mr Lang quietly. ‘It was retribution for what happened. The Germans had to pay.’

The bodies were then respectfully laid to rest in a well-attended ceremony at the site of an impressive new memorial that featured a large bronze sculpture of a dying man hanging from barbed wire. It was sculpted by the prominent Czech artist J. Matějů and paid for by the town. In a letter to the local authority in 1949 asking for donations, several residents wrote:
We do not know their names, not even their nationalities, we just know that they died under the rough Nazi boot so that we might live
.

Priska and Hana’s visit to the town was lovingly recorded and photographed, and it features to this day in the local museum and on a special noticeboard outside the station where Mr Pavliček once lived. Afterwards, Priska wrote to the people of the town to thank them again:

At the time and even now I am sure that without the help of the brave West Bohemian people we could not have survived, and my daughter certainly not. We are so grateful to Horní Bříza … for the unforgettable moments we spent there. We never fail to mention in interviews what the local people did for us during our sad incarceration.

Priska also took teenage Hana back to Mauthausen on a trip organised by an anti-Fascist group. But her daughter was traumatised by the experience, especially when she saw photographs of those killed in the gas chambers the day before her mother’s arrival. ‘It was a very raw experience for me and yet my mother seemed OK,’ said Hana. ‘She was talking to people and sharing experiences.’ It was more than forty years before Hana felt able to return to the camp. Priska never did.

Priska and Hana on holiday in Slovakia, 1965

In 1965, Priska also wrote to the people of Freiberg, Germany, who’d invited her back as one of the guests of honour to remember the women who worked in the factory. Accepting with thanks their ‘warm invitation’ to attend their memorial ceremonies, she told them, ‘Hana was the most beautiful child I had ever seen with … a round head, blonde hair, and blue eyes, which I copied
from the magnificent Freiberger children who amazed me daily with their big eyes on our escorted way to and from the factory.’ She said they would be able to see little difference between a twenty-year-old Freiberger girl and her daughter – ‘for me she is the dearest girlfriend, daughter, my whole life’. They visited the factory but were never taken to the sombre stone memorial in the town cemetery, which bore the words
KZ Freiberg
above a short tribute to the ‘Sacrifices of Fascism’.

Apart from thirty or so small scars on her body from the abscesses that had almost killed her as a baby, Hana suffered no serious health problems in later life. Having been covered with lice from birth, she did develop an allergic reaction to insect bites, but the main legacy of her unusual gestation was her ‘pathological aversion’ to any kind of shouting or screaming, she now feels because of what she heard in the womb and in the first few weeks of her birth. ‘If someone talks to me aggressively, all I want to do is run away and hide,’ she said. ‘Lest we forget, I was born with my hands in fists up around my ears!’

When Hana was twenty-three years old and newly married, she became pregnant with her only child. It was 1968. As her baby grew inside her, she watched anxiously as the student protesters of the ‘Prague Spring’ began to defy Communist rule. In August 1968, when 500,000 Warsaw Pact soldiers invaded Czechoslovakia to reinstate order, she decided to leave her country for good. ‘Probably because of my beginnings, once I saw the tanks and heard the shots, there was no way that I was going to bring a child into this world there,’ she said. She moved to Israel where she gave birth to her son Thomas, ‘Tommy’, in December. In 1972 she studied for a PhD in organic chemistry and eleven years later she emigrated to Chicago in the country of her liberators. She was married twice (to fellow Jews) and has two grandchildren, Jack and Sasha. Mark, her third husband of twenty-four years, is a Gentile physician and nephrologist and they both work in the pharmaceutical industry and live near San Francisco, California.