"I vy jste v tomhle pekle?"

The memoirs of Alžběta Sommer Lefkovits depict the last years of the war, 1944-1945, in which the author and those closest to her suffered racial persecution because of their Jewish origin. Until the autumn of 1944, the family lived in Prešov relatively sheltered due to the fact that Mrs. Lefkovits was a pharmacist by profession and thus fell into the category of so-called economically important Jews. After the suppression of the Slovak National Uprising, everything changed.

The author began to record her experiences at the instigation of her teenage grandchildren in 1986, and at first only distributed them to her friends and acquaintances, with the first publication in 1994 in Switzerland. The memoirs chart the life of one family in Slovak-Hungarian territory in a very dense and precise way, describing the efforts to rescue the children and their hiding, the family circumstances, the fate of individual family members, then the arrest and transport, life in the Ravensbrück concentration camp and then the transfer to Bergen-Belsen and liberation. Their distinctive feature is their austerity and the effort for accuracy that is evident everywhere.

The book is supplemented by a wealth of accompanying pictorial material from the archives of the London War Museum, a time table recording the post-war fate and a foreword for the Czech edition written by the author's son Ivan Lefkovits.

Czech edition