This article is my fulfilment of besoch rabbim ahallelenu — I will praise Hashem in public for saving my life and my soul

As told to Riki Goldstein by Mr. Shmuel Binyomin Schiffer, Vienna, Austria

IT

was 1941 when my parents got engaged. World War II was raging, the Nazis were storming across Europe, and in occupied Slovakia, times were already tense and difficult. My maternal grandmother suggested that they push off their chasunah until the political situation calmed down, but my father wouldn’t hear of it. So they got married in Piešt’any in 1941, with the Dayan of Piešt’any, Rav Yissachar Teichtal, author of Mishnas Sachir serving as mesader kiddushin, and set up their new home in my father’s hometown of Dolný Kubín in Northern Slovakia.

The Jews of Dolný Kubín were deported in stages, and therefore some of them managed to go into hiding before their turns came. My father, one of the community’s leaders, whose family had lived in the town for several generations, was the last Yid to be left there. In September 1942, two weeks before I was born, my parents decided to use the fake, gentile ID papers they had prepared to escape into Hungary. They packed two suitcases, called a taxi to take them to the train station, and their journey began.

When they got out of the taxi and turned around to take their cases, they saw the driver speed off with their belongings. Left with nothing besides the jewelry they had secreted in their pockets, and my father’s tallis and tefillin, they made their way to a small village called Zirc, in Hungary, near Pupa, to find a place to hide. Zirc had no minyan and no Jews. Their non-Jewish identity papers made it possible for them to hide there, and they kept a low profile.

For Yom Kippur of 1942, my father went to Budapest to lead the davening, leaving my mother behind, alone in the village. I was born on that Yom Kippur. Years later, I asked my father why he left her alone at that time, and he explained that it was safer for her. Although they had fake gentile papers, the Gestapo would check men whom they suspected of being Jewish, and his presence could have endangered my mother and me.

My birth certificate lists me as a Hungarian child, Gustave Veresh. But although we were in hiding, my parents were moser nefesh to somehow arrange my bris and pidyon haben. A mohel came from nearby Szombathely, my father was able to inform our relatives, and at the pidyon haben, the Kohein was Reb Yecheskel Friedman, the father-in-law of Reb Moshe Fuchs, later of Geneva, who edited the seforim of the Galante Rav.

Right before the pidyon haben, our family had moved to Pupa, where we were able to hide for the next year and a half. My father told me that it was truly quiet there. During that time, he was able to learn undisturbed, like no other time in his life. We were in a house with my aunts and several other Jews. (One of my aunts, Riza Neni, later married the Tchebiner Rav.)