Slovak journalist dedicates life to memorializing righteous
Tells stories of 138 Slovaks who helped save Jews during the Holocaust.
By GIL HOFFMANJournalist Dagmar Mozolova (right) sitting next to Hava Fono (left) who was saved with her parents by the Rovensky family in the Abraham village located in Slovakia.(photo credit: Courtesy)
The stories of the righteous people who hid Jews during the Holocaust must be told as soon as possible, according to Dagmar Mozolová, a journalist at the largest Slovak radio station, Radio Slovensko.She was interviewed in Slovakia on Monday by Jonny Daniels of the organization From the Depths, which is dedicated to helping the last remaining righteous gentiles in Eastern Europe.Over the past seven years, Mozolová, who was honored with the “Crystal Wing” award in the category of literature and journalism, has documented the stories of 138 Slovaks who helped save Jews during the Holocaust. She went from having a small organization to working on 26 documentaries.“I don’t want society to forget those stories,” Mozolová said. “A lot of the stories are unknown. They lived within families. People were never honored by official titles.”All of the stories are told on her 40-minute radio show, which has some 300,000 listeners.After the war, Slovakia was socialist, so many stories were hidden, Mozolová said. But many Jews came to the country in the 1990s after the fall of communism to look for the righteous gentiles, she said.Mozolová opened a foundation a year ago in Slovakia to be able to make documentary movies and write a book about the subject to spread the message wider, because there is so much she cannot show on the radio.One of the goals of her quest is to help fight against hatred and antisemitism, she said.When asked why what she is doing was so important to her, Mozolová said she moderated a discussion on the radio in 2013 about Christian-Jewish relations in Slovakia.A woman called and said while her mother was pregnant with her during the Holocaust, she had saved 11 Jews. The woman said her family lived next door to a group of German Nazis, and it was easy to hear them because they were so close.
Mozolová said: “I had three small children at the time, and I thought about this amazing lady whose family took the risk to save their Jewish neighbors and risked saving the life of their unborn baby.“After this live discussion on the radio, I couldn’t fall asleep and said to myself, ‘If there are witnesses of these stories still alive, I want to find them.’ I wanted to simply know why? How did they hide them? Where? How did they feed them? Was it dangerous? I wanted to know it all.”
