Dagmar Mozolová believes the stories of the righteous people who hid Jews in the Holocaust must be told as soon as possible.
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 in 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 the stories go on her radio show, where 300,000 people listen to the 40-minute show.
Mozolová said that after the war, Slovakia was socialist, so many stories were hidden. But many Jews came to the country in the 1990s after the fall of Communism to look for the Righteous.
She opened a foundation a year ago in Slovakia to be able to make documentary movies and a book about the subject to spread the message wider, because there is so much she cannot show on the radio.
Mozolová said one of the goals of her quest is to help fight against hatred and antisemitism.
When asked why what she was doing was so important to her, she said that in 2013, she moderated a discussion on the radio about Christian-Jewish relations in Slovakia. A woman called and she said her mother was pregnant with her during the Holocaust and during that time, her mother saved 11 Jews.
The woman said they lived next door to a group of German Nazis, so it was easy to hear the Nazis, because they were so close.
“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,” Mozolová said.
“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.’”