Tibor Spitz

It was in 1942 when they made it crystal clear what they were planning to do to us. We just didn’t know how. Hitler very clearly said in Mein Kampf that he would wipe out Jewish people to the last person…and he would also kill all the Slavic people…and he would also kill the people who were not white…all the colored people…and so on.

My mother understood it. My father understood it. But how did they approach this problem through God?

My father said, “If it is God’s intention to allow this, let’s become martyrs. Let’s go and die. God has a purpose. God has a plan. And it must serve some purpose. Let’s not resist. Let’s do whatever we are told to do and trust in God that there is a meaning to it.”

My mother said, “Hold it! God is not planning to kill us. Who is trying to kill us is Hitler. And Jozef Tiso, the president of the fascist Slovak Republic. Those people want to rob us and kill us. It’s not God. God gave us intelligence. God gave us muscles. God gave us a mind. God gave us the ability to resist, to defend ourselves. We are going to fight those people who try to kill us, and God will help us to do that.”

Then she called her three children and said, “We have two choices, my dear children. We can take a poison and die at our choice. This is our decision. Or we can fight against all odds, because around Slovakia, thousands of miles in all directions, are German S.S. and the Gestapo, and they will trace us, find us, and kill us anyway. Should we try against all odds to survive or not?”

We three children looked at each other and without hesitation we said, “No! Let’s go and fight. Even if they drag us to the railroad stations, force us to walk into the cattle cars, we would refuse it and then be shot on the spot.”

And this was unanimous. No doubts or hesitations in it. My brother immediately started thinking of a shelter in the forest. Our chance to survive at that time was nil. Absolutely nil. Yet we decided what to do. I was 12, my sister 10, my brother 14. We decided to fight regardless of common sense, regardless of anything. So we built a shelter in the forest, believing that the front line would move past us very quickly. The Soviet Army at that time was called the Red Army, and it was already in Poland and Ukraine. We were about 100-150 miles or kilometers away—perhaps even less. The Red Army stopped there to rearm and prepare for battle. We had to survive—200 days, seven months—under snow and ice in a forest very high in the mountains.

When we came out of that shelter, we saw craters a few yards wide made by cannon explosions. Spent cartridges and shells were all over. If they had fallen on our shelter we would have been gone, or, if we were found alive, the Army would have shot us. To survive those 200 days, we needed real miracles because there were thousands of opportunities for us to be killed. At one point, we were robbed. I escaped, but when I came back to bury them, they were alive, standing in their underwear in the snow.

For about three years we had to survive somehow, hiding, zigzagging, pretending, and then hiding underground, living like animals in the forest. We went through unimaginable starvation, suffering, severe weather conditions, mental anguish, and still we made it out alive somehow—miraculously.