Boros (Eckstein), Eva

Survivor/Hidden
Bratislava (Czechoslovakia), Budapest

Boros was born in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia in 1932. Her family owned several china and kitchen supply stores in Bratislava. When the Nazis came, the family was forced out of their home and business. Boros’s father became a leader in the Jewish Council. In 1942 Boros explains that her sister was sent to Budapest to live with relatives for safety. In 1944 her parents sent her and her two brothers to the same family when it became clear the Germans were planning the final deportations from Bratislava. The relatives, however, refused to take the children and sent them to a Jewish orphanage. When the Germans came to Budapest, they commandeered the orphanage building where the children were staying. Boros tells how the three children decided to run away and return to Bratislava. Their sister ran away from the relatives who were caring for her and joined the siblings. After a perilous journey, they all returned to their parents.

When the liquidation of the ghetto in Bratislava was imminent, Boros’s father managed to separately place his children with non-Jewish families for payment. Her parents were deported, and shortly after each child was turned out by their families because payments had stopped. Until the end of the war, they lived a precarious existence in the countryside, moving from village to village.

At the end of the war, they returned to Bratislava to find that their mother had died in Auschwitz, their father was dying in Ebensee, Austria, and their older brother had died in an Austrian labor camp. Boros contracted typhus.

In 1946 Boros went with a youth aliyah group to Palestine and was joined later by her brother and sister. She married in Israel, had two children, and moved to the United States in 1969.

Interview Information:
Date: February 11, 1983
Interviewer: Kay Roth
Length:
Format: Audio recording

Date: April 7, 1992
Interviewer: Rabbi Charles H. Rosenzveig
Length: Approx. 2 hours
Format: Video recording