The Train to Auschwitz (An Investigative Journey into Wartime Slovakia)

Tudor Parfitt tells the extraordinary story of a Jewish child who survived the Holocaust in Slovakia by an almost impossible chain of events. In 1942, Vera, eight, was on a train from the concentration camp at Sered, in western Slovakia, bound for Auschwitz. Had she arrived there, she would certainly have been murdered. Instead, close to the holding camp at Ž ilina, she escaped. He reconstructs Vera’ s story and, through it, the wider history of Slovak Jewry 1939 – 1945: the destruction of Jewish schools and synagogues, forced labour, petty humiliations, the fragile system of exemptions for doctors and other “ useful” Jews, and the Slovak government’ s decision to pay Nazi Germany to remove its Jews which led to deportation and extermination. When Parfitt first heard Vera's story many details had been obscured by time. To recover them, he travelled through Slovakia in 2023 and 2024, retracing her wartime steps and encountering archivists, scholars, priests, local historians, socialites, drunks, and antisemites. Part Holocaust history, part life history, and part literary travel account, the book follows a trail of memory, doubt, and discovery through wartime and present-day Slovakia.