During the 1930s, growing pressure on Jewish communities across Europe culminated in what became known as the Holocaust: the systematic attempt to annihilate European Jewry. Although its forms varied from country to country, the objective remained the same. Nazi Germany sought the complete destruction of the Jewish people through what it termed the “Final Solution”(Endlösung). Within Nazi racial ideology, Jews were defined as a “counter-race”(Gegenrasse), portrayed as the antithesis of the so-called Aryan race and denied even the status of full humanity.
The Holocaust in the territory of present-day Slovenia did not begin with deportations and murder. Its roots lay in the gradual spread of antisemitism, social exclusion, and anti-Jewish legislation before the collapse of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. The government signed a contract with Hitler, a pact to join the Axis powers, which sparked fierce resistance among the people and ultimately led to its downfall. Antisemitic attitudesin Slovenian surroundings wereexpressed through political rhetoric, religious discourse, and the press. Sections of the Catholic and right-wing media portrayed Jews as outsiders, exploiters, and enemies of Christianity, while simultaneously accusing them of promoting both liberalism and communism.A significant role in this process was played by Dr. Anton Korošec, leader of the Slovenian People’s Party, Catholic priest, and minister in the Yugoslav government. In 1940, he introduced a series of anti-Jewish measures that restricted the access of Jewish pupils and students to secondary schools and universities and limited Jewish participation in the food trade.
The Axis invasion of Yugoslavia on 6 April 1941 divided Slovenian territory among several occupying powers. In the regions annexed by Nazi Germany—Styria, Carinthia, and Upper Carniola—persecution began immediatelyafter the occupation. Following Hitler’s visit to Maribor in April 1941, policies of Germanisation, expulsions, registrations, arrests, and confiscations intensified. Jews were excluded from public life, deprived of the right to practice their professions, stripped of property,increasingly isolated from societyand lost their general safety.
Conditions differed in the Italian-occupied Province of Ljubljana. Until September 1943, Italian authorities subjected Jews to surveillance, restrictions, and internment, yet their policy generally focused on transferring local Jews and Jewish refugees to internment camps within Italy. According to contemporary estimates, approximately 1,500 individuals passed through this system in three successive transports. For many refugees arriving from Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Germany, Ljubljana became a temporary refuge and a place of hope, offering the possibility of eventual escape from occupied Europe through Italian territory. Local Jews opposed internment, though unsuccessfully.
The situation changed dramatically after Italy’s capitulation in September 1943. German forces assumed control of the Province of Ljubljana, the Littoral region, Trieste, Gorizia, and Istria. The newly established Adriatic Littoral Operational Zone came under the authority of Odilo Globočnik, one of the principal organisersof the murder of Jews in occupied Poland. Systematic arrests, deportations, confiscations, and searches for Jews and those who assisted them soon followed. Trieste, with the Risiera di San Sabba camp, became one of the principal centresof Nazi terror in the region. Many Jews who had initially escaped immediate destruction through Italian internment were subsequently deported to German concentration camps, where numerous victims lost their lives.
The destruction of Jewish life was particularly devastating in Prekmurje. Following theHungarian occupation and theGerman occupation of Hungary in March 1944, the Jews of Murska Sobota, Lendava, and the surrounding area were rounded up on 26 and 27 April and gathered in the synagogues of Lendava and Murska Sobota. From there they were deported via Čakovec and Nagykanizsa to Auschwitz. Most were murdered shortly after arrival. Among them was Dr. Lazar Roth, the last rabbi of Murska Sobota. These deportations brought about the near-complete destruction of the most visible and historically rooted Jewish community in Slovenia.
In September 1944, the remaining Jews in Ljubljana and elsewhere were also arrested and deported. They were sent to Auschwitz, Dachau, Ravensbrück, Bergen-Belsen, Mauthausen, and other concentration camps. Many did not survive. Others escaped persecution through hiding, forged documents, participation in the partisan resistance, or flight through Italy to Switzerland. Individual fates were shaped by occupation zones, citizenship, family connections, opportunities for escape, and the willingness of others to provide assistance.
The Holocaust resulted in the near-total destruction of a Jewish world that had helped shape the economic, cultural, and social life of these lands for centuries. Synagogues were destroyed, sold, or abandoned; cemeteries were damaged or looted; property was confiscated; families were dispersed and the names were forgotten and erased from public memory till the early years of twenty-first century.
Erika Fürst (1931–2024)
Erika Fürst was born on 10 February 1931 in Murska Sobota, into a Jewish family from the Prekmurje region. Her childhood resembled that of many other children of her generation: it was shaped by family, school, friendships, and the sense of security that children take for granted. She grew up in a world in which Jews were an integral part of the town’s daily life, contributing to its economic, cultural, and social fabric. No one could have imagined that this world would almost completely disappear within a few short years. When Prekmurje was annexed by Hungary in 1941, life for Jewish families began to change. At first, the changes came gradually; then they accelerated. Restrictions, prohibitions, and humiliations became part of everyday life. Jews lost rights, property, and their sense of belonging. By 1944, it had become clear that catastrophe was approaching. Erika was thirteen years old when she and her family were arrested and deported. Together with her mother, Terezija, and her sister, Šarika, she was taken first to a collection camp and then deported to Auschwitz. For a young girl who had only recently attended school and lived an ordinary life, arriving at the concentration camp meant entering a world in which no human rules applied. Upon arrival in Auschwitz, the prisoners faced selection. In a matter of moments, the notorious physician Josef Mengele decided who would live and who would die. In that decisive instant, Erika’s mother gathered all her courage and presence of mind. She lied about the ages of her daughters, presenting them as older and fit for labour. That seemingly small act became the difference between life and death. Erika and her sister were sent to the line of those temporarily spared. In Auschwitz, Erika became prisoner number A-15981. Hunger, cold, disease, humiliation, and constant fear became part of daily existence. Death was everywhere. Erika later recalled that there were so many corpses around their barracks that they no longer obtained water by melting snow but fetched it from a nearby frozen reservoir. In the camp, one learned that it was possible to lose almost everything—one’s name, dignity, family, and sense of time—without losing the will to live. She never saw her father again. Nor did she ever learn when or how he had died.
When the camp was finally liberated, Erika survived. But survival did not mean the end of suffering. It meant the beginning of life with loss. She returned to a world she scarcely recognised. The community she had known in childhood had all but vanished. Many relatives, friends, and neighbours never came home. Yet Erika chose not to remain silent.
or decades, she shared her story with schoolchildren, students, researchers, and museum visitors. She did not speak in order to evoke pity, but to preserve the memory of those who never had the chance to tell their own stories. Through her testimony, she helped rescue from oblivion the names, faces, and destinies of the Jews of Prekmurje, whose world had been almost entirely destroyed during the Holocaust. In recognition of her extraordinary contribution to preserving historical memory, she was awarded the Golden Order of Merit of the Republic of Slovenia in 2012. Erika Fürst died in 2024 as the last Jewish woman from Prekmurje to have survived Auschwitz. Until the final years of her life, she believed that bearing witness was the responsibility of those who had survived. Even if evil can never truly be understood, it must be named. Even if loss can never be repaired, it must be remembered. And even if we cannot bring back those who were murdered, we can restore something that was taken from them: their names, their stories, and their place in our shared memory.
Heimer- Furst Family
I am Aviva Koren (née Klein), from Israel. I'm second generation Holocaust survivor. My parents were born in Europe and survived the terrible Holocaust. I will tell about the history of my mother's family Šarolta/Šarika/Sara in Hebrew the Heimer family in Slovenia. The Heimer family is from my mother's father's side. Great-grandfather Ignac/Yitzhak and great-grandmother Karolina/Leah/Luna (née Weiner) lived in Murska Sobota. Grandfather had a store. Karolina and Ignac Heimer had 17 children, of whom 5 died in their early years. The 12 children were: Oskar, Jeno, Arnold, Malvina, Bertha, Šarlota, Regina, Hermina, Irma, Samuel, Sandor, Ida. The Furst family is from my mother's mother's side. Great-grandmother Šarlota (née Reich) married great-grandfather Ludvik Furst. They had 8 children: Jeno, Ilona, Gizi, Edward, Jolanka, Gusti, Feri, Bella. Grandfather Oskar was born in 1894 in Murska Sobota, while Grandmother Jolan was born in 1896 in Bakovci. Grandfather was a dentist by profession. His clinic in Murska Sobota still exists today. The family lived in Murska Sobota, at 19 Cvetkova Street. The house was large with a big garden. Family members gathered at the house on holidays and weekends. On holidays and on Shabbat, they prayed in the synagogue. The family home no longer exists. Grandfather Oskar was one of the community leaders and one of the managers of the "Mura" football club. The family had 4 children: the firstborn son, Ludvik (Lali), my mother Šarlota/Šarika, sister Leah, and the youngest sister, Gertruda/Truda. My mother was born on 07.03.1925 in Murska Sobota. The children attended school. At home they spoke Slovenian, Prekmurje dialect, German and Hungarian. At school they also learned French and Latin. They learned to play music, to ski and to help around the house. Mother played the piano and accordion. In summer they made pickles and jams for winter. The three daughters in the family had to learn housework and also to knit, sew and embroider. Each daughter had to embroiderher name on linens and prepare and take care of her "dowry." What each would take with her to her new home when she married. My grandmother, Jolan Heimer, my mother's mother, told the daughters: "Even though you don't need to know this now, you must. It's worth learning all the housework, who knows where you'll end up in the future?" Mother finished her studies at the gymnasium. The family went on trips and vacations together. The atmosphere at home was characterized by very strict education and setting clear boundaries, but at the same time the children experienced a happy childhood, with discipline, warmth, closeness and love. In 1944, during the night in late April, the Jews from the city and villages in the Prekmurje area were gathered at the synagogue. Before they were taken away, they managed to hide jewelry in the ground in the yard. In 27 and 28 April they were first transported to Čakovec, Croatia. From Čakovec they traveled through Nagykanizsa, Hungary, to Birkenau, Poland. In an interview after the war, mother said: "At Birkenau there was a crematorium. I saw many transports arriving day after day. Every day you could hear the cries of the victims. The sky above the crematorium was on fire." In November 1944, due to the approaching Red Army, they began evacuating people from the camp. According to my mother, she was lucky and remained until liberation by the Russians on January 27, 1945. Mother Šarika, aunt Leah and Uncle Lali survived the Holocaust. In 1945, my mother and her brother returned home. Her parents perished at Auschwitz-Birkenau and her younger sister, Gertruda, perished at Bergen-Belsen. Her sister, Leah, returned only after a year when she stayed at a sanatorium in Sweden. Also, dozens of their family members did not return. Other people lived in the house. Mother and her brother had to find another place to live until they could prove the house belonged to them. After proving the house was theirs, they found, luckily, their photos and those of their family and linens. Those same linens that the daughters had embroidered their names on. My parents immigrated to Israel. Father came to Israel from Czechoslovaki in 1946. Mother immigrated after the establishment of the State in 1949. Both were without family, without a home, without knowledge of the Hebrew language.They met and started a family. My parents had two children, my older brother, Yoram/ Oskar, and me. We grew up without grandparents. My mother kept in touch with family relatives in Slovenia and visited them. My parents have passed away. My mother 28 years ago and my father 18 years ago. They passed away on the same calendar date, 20.03, ten years apart. They had 9 grandchildren: my brother has three children and I have six children. They have 16 great-grandchildren so far. Lali, my mother's brother, stayed in Slovenia, married Gabika and they had 3 children: Truda, Eva/Beba and Janez/Diki. They have 3 grandchildren. Leah, her sister, married Slavko Stare. They had 3 children: Milan, Oskar and Jolan. Leah came with her three children to Israel in 1966. The children married and had 11 grandchildren. There are also great-grandchildren. Oskar lives in Slovenia and Israel. We have relatives in Murska Sobota and in Ljubljana. Our "tribe" is growing and this is a victory of good over evil, of light over darkness, of hope, optimism and continuity over pessimism and darkness.
Prenosi
Zemljevid spotikavcev v Ljubljani (PDF)
