By Danny Bloom
CHIAYI CITY, Taiwan — There’s a Jewish story everywhere, for sure,
and this one spans three continents and winds its way from North
America to Taiwan to Israel.
Let me explain.
Peter Kubicek, now 83, lives in New York, but he was born in
Czechoslovakia, a nation that no longer exists. The country was
dismembered in 1939 by Hitler and Kubicek as a young boy found himself
living in Slovakia, a small quasi-independent country firmly allied to
Hitler’s Germany, then-run by an indigent Slovak Fascist party, he
told me in a recent email.
“In 1940, the Slovakia government promulgated a series of antisemitic
laws, designed to gradually choke off Jewish life, Kubicke added,
noting: “In 1942, the government embarked with great zeal and
enthusiasm on the task of annihilating Slovak Jewry, a community close
to 90,00 people. By the end of that year, close to 60,000 Jews were
deported, mainly to Auschwitz. Of these 60,000 about 240 survived.
This is not a misprint, Danny; please read those figures again: 240
survivors out of 60,000!”
In a memoir of his young life during the war, Kubicek has described
his experiences of how he and his family survived 1942, and the Slovak
concentration camp in which they were detained and their actual
release from same. The next wave of deportations commenced in
September 1944, and this time Kubicek and his family were deported —
but to Germany, rather than to Auschwitz. Kubicek survived six German
concentration camps in the last eight months of the war, he told me.
“In the last four camps, I became close to two Slovak boys of my own
age, named Artur and Miki,” Kubicek said. “The three of us shared the
same fate right through the infamous twelve-day “Sachsenhausen Hunger
March” and we were liberated together near the town of Schwerin in
northern Germany in early May of 1945.”
Kubicek never saw Artur or Miki again after the war, as he went to
America, and they made their way to Israel. But fast forward 67 years
to the summer of 2012, and this three-continents story about three
amigos comes into focus. One morning, Kubicek gets a longdistance
phone call from Israel, with a woman he does not know on the line
speaking with a strong Israeli accent.
She tells him she is the daughter of an elderly man in Israel named
Artur “who thinks he knew you a long time ago in Germany.”
She hands the phone to Artur who, speaking in Slovak, their common
native language, tells Kubicek that his grandson “found” his name and
phone number via the Internet. internet. Now living in Haifa, Artur
says he wants to read Kubicek’s Holocaust memoir but that since he
cannot read English, he will ask his children to try to translate it
into Hebrew via Google Translator.
Ten days later, Artur calls again from Haifa.
“In our second phone conversation, Artur tells me that Miki also lives
in Haifa,” Kubicek recalls. “In September, finally, I get a phone call
from Miki. Later, we exchanged some old wartime photos and letters in
Slovak by snail mail, since Miki does not know how to use the
Internet.”
Miki’s grandson teaches him how to use Facebook and email, and this
past January, Kubicek received an email from Miki via Facebook with a
a current photo of him and his wife which had been posted on Facebook
by the grandson.
“I have now exchanged several messages with Miki on Facebook – all in
Slovak, of course, our native language,” Kubicek tells me in Taiwan by
email from New York.
An interconnected world grows more connected every day. And the three
amigos from Slovakia long ago are reunited by the miracle of the
Internet in a story that surely resonates worldwide.
*
Bloom is Taiwan bureau chief for San Diego Jewish World. He may be contacted via dan.bloom@sdjewishworld.com