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Oral history interview with Štefan Lach

Oral History | Digitized | Accession Number: 2011.438.53 | RG Number: RG-50.688.0053

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    Oral history interview with Štefan Lach

    Overview

    Interview Summary
    Štefan Lach, born in 1929 in Poprad, Slovakia, describes having four siblings; his father who was a taxi driver; not being able to attend an art school in Bratislava, Slovakia, because his father had been labeled a collaborator; his father joining an international underground anti-Nazi movement in 1939 that went through Poland, Hungary, France, and London, smuggling Polish citizens to join Polish legions and to train in France then move to Britain to join air forces; helping his father smuggle people; transporting Polish people across the Tatra Mountains through the Slovak village of Osturňa or to the Tri Studničky mountain chalet in Podbanské; smuggling people from Štrbské Pleso in the Tatras, Slovakia, to the village of Gemerská Poloma near the Hungarian border and then to Hungary; couriers bringing groups of three to four people to their home for transport; Gestapo police coming to their home every day; hiding a Jewish doctor in a cellar under their garage so the doctor wouldn’t be transported to Auschwitz; hiding a deserting German soldier in a box of sawdust, and learning that when the soldier tried to go home to Germany he stopped a car of German soldiers and the soldiers didn’t know him, so they took him five-hundred meters away and shot him; having a middle-school teacher who was commander of the Hlinka Guard women and forced all students to join Hlinka youth; Slovak nationalist politician Alexander Šaňo Mach visiting Poprad in 1943, at which time his teacher made students waive to him (Mach supported Nazis and Germany); and all Jewish people having to wear an identifying Jewish star.
    Interviewee
    Štefan Lach
    Interviewer
    Eva Riečanská
    Date
    interview:  2016 February 08
    Geography
    creation: Poprad (Slovakia)
    Credit Line
    United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection, courtesy of the Jeff and Toby Herr Foundation

    Physical Details

    Language
    Slovak
    Extent
    1 digital file : MPEG-4.

    Rights & Restrictions

    Conditions on Access
    There are no known restrictions on access to this material.
    Conditions on Use
    No restrictions on use

    Keywords & Subjects

    Personal Name
    Lach, Štefan, 1929-

    Administrative Notes

    Provenance
    This is a witness interview of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's Perpetrators, Collaborators, and Witnesses: The Jeff and Toby Herr Testimony Initiative, a multi-year project to record the testimonies of non-Jewish witnesses to the Holocaust. The interview was directed and supervised by Nathan Beyrak.
    Funding Note
    The production of this interview was made possible by Jeff and Toby Herr.
    The cataloging of this oral history interview has been supported by a grant from the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany.
    Record last modified:
    2023-11-16 09:26:57
    This page:
    https:​/​/collections.ushmm.org​/search​/catalog​/irn533581

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