Jozef Spitz

A brief history of Jozef Spitz's and his family's life as related to me by his son Tibor in an email:

I am not so sure if you know that my parents JOZEF SPITZ (born 1902) and my mother TEREZIA HERZOG (born 1904) were chalutzim in British Palestine in 1920s. 16 Trnava city boys and girls in a tiny moshav (a shag) started what later became a big city Bnei Berak. My parents married there and had a daughter Ester who died 5 week old. She was buried in Tel Aviv, next to the founders of Jewish Homeland and later State of Israel (Max Nordau, Chaim Nachman Bialik etc). Because the original stone crumbled, I let make a marble plaque for her located on the stone wall of the Cemetery on Trumpeldor street. (Later on many more similar plagues appeared there). After living there for several years and working at Tel Aviv that was a swamp, my father became very ill (malaria and other tropical diseases) and was also wounded by Arab snipers. In order to save his life, he had to seek medical treatment in Europe. They returned to their parents home to Czechoslovakia (Trnava). Later my father became a chazan (cantor) for a Jewish congregation in the high mountains of Orava in Dolny Kubin and (after the WWII), in Liptovsky Svaty Mikulas, both in Slovakia. I had an older brother and a younger sister. Being in charge of Jewish burials, in 1942 saved us from deportation as we were supposed to be deported with the 'last transport' to a Death camp. Very harsh experience in Palestine allowed my parents to recognize and to acknowledge the Nazi intentions to wipe us out (very few Jews believed it) and together with us 3 children (and grandfather Zigmund Spitz) we managed to survive under incredibly risky & harsh conditions hiding during the last winter 1944 - 45 in a forest under the ground and snow until the Red army liberated the area in April 1945.