Spring and summer 1942 was probably the worst period of internal terror in Slovakia. It was also the time of mass deportation of Slovak Jews to the extermination camps in Poland.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Poland is a wildly dramatic and tragic story. It's just unbelievable what went on with those people. How they survive, I don't really know. The Germans had a particular hatred for the Poles; they really considered them subhuman Slavs, and they were very brutal to them.
I just happen to know quite a lot of what happened in Czechoslovakia between 1968 and the fall of Communism.
The people in Poland had to deal with painful reforms.
Poland was the racial laboratory of the Nazis. This is where they started to put their abhorrent theories into practice.
This is the generation whose first cry of life was the Hungarian uprising.
In 1945, when the Second World War technically ends in Poland, the incoming Soviet army liberates some groups of people but begins to oppress the general population, in some ways more harshly than it had happened before.
My parents emigrated from Poland in 1924 with my brother, who was a few months old. They were from a simple family of Polish Jews. They were looking, I suppose, for a better economic life and were escaping from an anti-Semitic environment.
Fifty years after half a million gypsies were exterminated in the Second World War - thousands of them in Auschwitz - we're again preparing the mass killing of this minority.
The war years were the most difficult time of my life. There was real famine in Moscow. The water froze inside the houses. There was no heat.
For those of us imprisoned in Poland, the Prague Spring was a harbinger of hope.