Peter Kubicek

I was born in 1930 in Czechoslovakia, a country that no longer exists -- so, specifically the country is now Slovakia. My birthplace is a town called Trenčin. In the town's principal square, in the most prominent location, was situated "Drogeria Kubiček," my father's store. It was a kind of miniature department store. My father actually owned the building: the store covered the entire ground floor; and our spacious apartment was above it.

My mother loved working in the store. To take care of the household she had a live-in maid, a cook, and a governess for me. By law, all businesses and offices were closed from noon to 2 PM and all employees went to lunch. In our case, my parents simply came upstairs; and lunch -- the main meal of the day -- had been prepared by the cook and served by the maid in our formal dining room.

My mother came from a German-speaking part of the country where she had attended Jewish schools whose language of instruction was German. My father's schooling was in Hungarian, but he also spoke fluent Slovak and German. So, in essence I grew up completely bi-lingual and spoke Slovak and German with equal fluency. My early childhood governess spoke German with me; once I started elementary school at the age of six, my new governess was Slovak, so she could help me with my homework.

Schools were run by religious authorities: so, my choice was a Catholic school (the dominant religion in Slovakia), or the single local Jewish Elementary School which I attended. When I was eight years old, my parents hired an Austrian woman who had lived in England, so she could tutor me in English. My parents considered the knowledge of languages an important skill.

This peaceful existence was shattered in in March, 1939, when Hitler's Germany annexed the Czech lands, renamed them "The Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia;" while Slovakia became a quasi-independent Fascist state, proudly allied with Nazi Germany. It was now run by the "Hlinka Guard" which was patterned after the Nazi Storm Troopers. They had installed their own government, led by President Josef Tito, a Catholic priest deeply involved in fascist politics. A virulent streak of anti-Semitism united the Slovak fascists with their German Nazi brethren.

You can read what happened next in my first memoir, entitled "1000:1 ODDS." I later published an expanded version of same under the title "Memories of Evil -- Recalling a World War II Childhood."