David Markovic testimony

David Markovic was born in Rosvegovo, Czechoslovakia (present day Rosvegovo, Ukraine) on 3 May 1920. He was the youngest son in a family of eight children, and his father was a cattle dealer. In 1940, when the portion of Slovakia in which they lived was annexed to Hungary, Markovic was conscripted into a forced labor battalion, and sent to Romania and Yugoslavia, working in a number of locations, including the copper mine at Bor, Serbia, where he was for two years. During the German retreat from the Balkans in 1944-1945, he endured a death march to Austria, and subsequently was interned in a series of concentration camps, including Flossenbürg and Dachau. After liberation, he contracted typhus, and then tuberculosis, and as a result was sent to a sanatorium in Czechoslovakia to convalesce, where he remained until 1949. During this time he renewed contact with those of his siblings who had survived, including his sister Hinda, who moved to Karlovy Vary (Karlsbad). It was during this time they were contacted by an American cousin, Mack Markovitz, who sponsored the immigration of first Hinda, her husband, and child, and later David, who had first left Czechoslovakia for Israel, and after a stay in Paris, arrived in the United States in 1951. He settled in New York, working in factories and then a butcher shop, and met and married his wife, Sadie, in 1952. They had two sons, Martin and Steven.