This photo was taken in April 1945 in the village of Motycky, and shows our departure from our hiding place in the nearby mountains.
We were in the mountains until the liberation of Banska Bystrica. Bystrica was liberated on 26th March 1945. We didn’t want to leave our hiding place yet. Karol Kürti said that we still had very hard times in store. ‘Don’t be in a rush, you’ll look back fondly at our stay in Turiec.’ That happened, too. We didn’t come down until 10th April. We packed everything up and set out in the direction of Bystrica. On the way we met Dr. Geiger from Ruzomberok. He joined us. Because we didn’t have any way of getting to Bystrica, we went to our friend the German lady, who’d been our connection the last several months. Her name was Mrs. Müller. There we found out that my boyfriend at the time, Goldstein, had fallen in the uprising. If he hadn’t fallen, I would’ve probably married him.
Mr. Müller greeted us, and brought duvets, quilts and blankets. Imagine that we didn’t know how to sleep in a bed, that’s how unused we’d gotten to it. We slept only on the floor. At Mrs. Müller’s we split up. The Kürtis went to Komarno. They had a long trip ahead of them, because the trains weren’t running. My father decided that we’d go to Batovce, as the last several years before the war he’d worked there. We made it to one village, about five kilometers from Batovce, where we met some people we knew. They were glad to see us. We asked them to please not let people in Batovce know that we were on the way home. One of them sat on a bicycle and went to Batovce. Imagine that they were waiting for us on the square with a band.
