Helen Senor
Helen Senor was born on Kosice, Slovakia. She was raised in an Orthodox Jewish household and is the youngest of five children – three girls and two boys. Her father worked as a wine distributor. While she had always dealt with antisemitism, Helen recalls living a very ordinary life until the Nazis arrived in the summer of 1944.
One day, while she was running an errand with her father, the Nazis rounded up all of the Jews they could find, including Helen’s mother and sister, and brought them to the grounds of a factory in town. Not knowing what to do and wanting to be with other members of their family, Helen and her father voluntarily went to the factory grounds. (Helen’s other three siblings left for different parts of Slovakia before the Germans arrived. She believes that they had sensed what was coming.)
At the factory, her mother could tell that something bad was happening, so when she saw farmers coming in and out of the factory, she paid one of them to smuggle the family out. Helen, her sister and mother hid under potato sacks and were smuggled out by the farmer. The next day the farmer was sent back to get her father. Her father refused to leave and said that what her mother had done was foolish. He was confident that God would not let anything bad happen to the Jews. Her father, and all of the other people in the factory, were deported to Auschwitz and murdered in the gas chambers.
Helen, her sister and mother walked through forests and ended up in a town called Horovce. They hid in the attic of a Jewish Community Center for six months. There were about 20 people in total in the attic. They all paid the superintendent of the building to keep them hidden and to bring them food. The Nazis, not realizing that Jews were hiding in the attic, decided to stay in the Center when they were in the town. Although Helen lived in constant fear of being found, and there were indeed some close calls, the Nazis never found the people in the attic.
After about six months, Helen’s older brother who had traveled across Slovakia before the Germans arrived, came and convinced his mother and sisters to leave with him. The family walked to another town and told anyone they encountered that they were war refugees and did not reveal that they were Jewish. They eventually found a woman who permitted them to stay in a hut behind her house, although they had to promise that they were not Jewish. While living in the hut, they still tried to retain some of their Jewish traditions. Behind a covered window, they lit a chanukiah for Chanukah. Six months after they arrived in the town, the Russians came and freed them from the Germans.
Helen, her mother, sister, and brother headed back to Kosice. They stayed there until the communists took power in 1949. From Slovakia they went to Austria and then to Paris where they waited a year for papers allowing them to enter Canada.
In Canada, Helen had four children. Her grandsons Eli and Asher are students at the Heschel School. In the summer of 2014, Helen made aliyah and moved to Israel. She says that voting in a democratic, Jewish country as a citizen is a dream come true.