Trude Silman MBE, Bratislava, wartime:

"My mother is a question mark. I know she survived ‘til 1944 because we used to get the odd occasional 25-word Red Cross letter, but then it stopped. I really don’t know exactly what happened to her. Initially she was in Bratislava. I’m given to understand she worked as a nurse in the Jewish hospital. Eventually she must have moved out of there & gone further East when there was the Slovak uprising. As far as we can gather, but we have no proof, she went out one day & never came back.

They assumed she was one of the people who was picked up & shot. But we have no clear evidence as to what actually happened to her, we believe she was sheltered by a Roman Catholic priest, & we actually had some proof of this, because, after the war, the priest’s housekeeper somehow or other sent us a letter telling us about some possessions of my mothers, which they were placing with another aunt. But we’ve lost the letter so we’ve no idea what, where & how. I’ve never been able to trace it. If you don’t know the place, if you don’t know the name, if you haven’t the time, if you don’t speak the language, it is not easy to do. So we hope that possibly still some literature will come up from somewhere. The Red Cross haven’t been able to trace her & there’s no record.

She seemed to lead the sort of life that most of her sisters lived. They did their basic cooking, they did their shopping, they met in the coffee house to talk, they went to each others’ houses & that was basically it. But my mother was a very early riser. She used to go & do the market shopping very early in the morning, about five in the morning when the market started, I remember that. She was a fabulous cook, & unfortunately I never picked it up, because I was too young at that age to learn about those sorts of things.

It's a tragedy, a real tragedy, what happened to my parents. I only found out relatively recently that my aunt & uncle managed to get them a post as housekeepers, domestics. My father was already well in his 50s, & he decided he was too old to make that sort of a commitment & he didn’t think that the Holocaust would arrive, he didn’t think it was going to be what it was going to be. So my parents didn’t come out. I only discovered this when I found a document from one of the refugee committees. There was a little ‘D’ against my parents' name that indicated that they were granted a domestic permit. They never took it up. So that was that, I only discovered that relatively recently."

In 1939 Trude came to the UK with her aunt. Her brother & sister were already there.

"Up to about 1941 were letters written on what I would call toilet paper & my father did most of the writing, used to be a little sheet of paper & if it came to me I would pass it to my sister, & she would pass it onto my brother, so we used to circulate our letters. That’s why some of them have gone astray, because my brother destroyed all of his stuff, he couldn’t bear it. So we lost a lot. Then the letters stopped.

My father was transported to Auschwitz on the 19th of April, 1942. The death certificate said the 8th of May. So he survived 3 weeks in Auschwitz, which doesn’t surprise me, because when he was transported he had actually injured his leg, & my cousin who saw him off said he was limping when he went on the transport. You know, you were expecting to see your parents very soon. There wasn’t a day, every single night I used to pray they’re all right, & that they’ll be safe, & I’ll see them soon, this went on for years & years & years. But again the emotion has gone out of this as the years have come on, that goes, you only remember the nice things."

Trude Silman MBE

Memories

Subscribe to our newsletter