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spoke and I didn’t say anything either … I knew how to stay calm in the face of adversity. I didn’t start anything.’
    On that fine autumn day and at a cost to the Slovak government of 1,000 Reichsmarks, Priska and Tibor Löwenbein were ‘dragged’ from their home and forced into the back of a large black van. They had to leave behind Tibor’s collections of stamps, his pipes, shirts, well-stocked bookcase and precious notebooks containing years of writing.
    The young couple were driven first to the large Orthodox Jewish synagogue in Heydukova Strasse. Kept waiting there for hours with scores of others sitting on the floor or on their luggage, they feared for their lives, while Priska was stricken by a bout of morning sickness – the first she’d ever suffered. Fighting waves of nausea, she clung to Tibor who kept telling her to remember their little one. ‘My husband was just caressing me and saying, “Maybe they’ll send us home, Pirečko .” I was only thinking about my baby. I wanted that baby so very much.’
    Later that day, they and 2,000 other Jews were transferred by bus to the small railway station at Lamač and then sent sixty kilometres east to the sprawling Sered’ labour and transit camp in the Danubian lowland. A former military base, Sered’ had been run by the Hlinka Guard prior to the uprising but then came under the supervision of SS officer Alois Brunner, assistant to Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi Obersturmbannführer (lieutenant colonel) and one of the chief perpetrators of Hitler’s so-called ‘Final Solution to the Jewish question’.
    Brunner had been sent to Sered’ to personally supervise the deportation of the last of the Slovak Jews after his success in overseeinga similar operation in Vichy France. Often seen wearing his favourite white uniform, Brunner is believed to have been responsible for the transportation of over 100,000 people to Auschwitz.

    Jews being unloaded from cattle wagons at Auschwitz
    Those who arrived in Sered’ were herded into wooden barracks that were quickly overwhelmed by the sheer numbers. The prisoners’ dehumanisation began with early morning roll calls, or Appelle , and a strict regimen of hard physical labour or domestic duties. Crammed into every available space, they were expected to exist each day on a half mug full of bitter ‘coffee’, some anaemic soup of questionable origin, and a little stale bread. Some of the more devout Jews used the hot water masquerading as food to wash their hands before they carefully sliced and shared out their pitiful rations.
    On Yom Kippur, the day Priska and her husband had been observing in Bratislava, the Nazis at Sered’ roasted a whole pig in the middle of the camp and laughingly invited the half-starved Jewsto share it. Not one is reported to have stepped forward, in spite of their hunger.
    The first transportations East from Sered’ started almost immediately after Priska and Tibor arrived by bus, as Brunner supervised the ‘liquidation’ of the camp in readiness for the next influx of prisoners. On 30 September 1944, the almost 2,000 Bratislavan Jews were marched from their barracks by Slovak and Hungarian SS officers in the middle of the night, and lined up in military formation before being shoved into freight wagons. Between eighty and a hundred people were squashed into each boxcar, with barely room to breathe, let alone move. Once the heavy wooden doors were slid shut, leaving them suffocating in the semi-darkness, the smallest of the children were passed over the heads of the others, to be held on the laps of those who had a little room to sit on a narrow plank at the back. The rest could only stand or squat.
    There was no sanitation other than an empty wooden bucket and a tin can full of water, and each wagon was soon stinking and unhygienic as the pail slopped its contents at every jolt. Some tried to empty it out of the tiny window but a barbed-wire grille prevented it from being tipped up