Joe Veselsky was born in 1918 in an empire that no longer exists and will live out his days in a country that did not exist when he was born.
His father, Maximilian Veselsky, was Slovakian and his mother Bertha was the daughter of a famous Hungarian rabbi. They did not speak each other’s language, but they had an arranged marriage in the Jewish faith.
His father fought with the Austro-Hungarian empire in the first World War and was invalided out in 1917. Joe was born on October 17th, 1918, in the town of Trnava, Slovakia, the same month that the empire broke up and the republic of Czechoslovakia was proclaimed.
In 1939 Adolf Hitler’s Germany annexed Czechoslovakia and a puppet Nazi Slovak republic was set up. The nightmare for the Veselsky family and for all Czechoslovakian Jews began.
His parents and only sibling, Hugo, and Hugo’s wife, perished in Auschwitz. The 80th anniversary of his liberation happens on Monday.
He saw his parents being pushed into a cattle truck. “My mother’s very last word was [change your religion],” Joe Veselsky said in a Newstalk documentary in 2020.
In Ireland, an event to mark International Holocaust Memorial Day will take place on Sunday at Dublin’s Mansion House.
Taoiseach Micheál Martin, meanwhile will on Monday attend a memorial at Auschwitz itself.
Mr Veselsky survived with the help of friends. He spent the last two years of the war in the Carpathian mountains fighting with the Slovak resistance against the Nazis.
Even after the war his ordeal wasn’t over. He was targeted by the communists and fled Czechoslovakia for Ireland in 1948.
He made quite a mark in his adopted country. He founded a successful jewellery business in Dublin and became one the presidents of the Irish Table Tennis Association.
In 2016 he was conferred with an honorary degree at Trinity College Dublin, having in 2010, at the age of 93, resumed his education, which had been cut short by the second World War.
In October last year, following the death of Martin McEvilly at the age of 108, Mr Veselsky became the oldest man in Ireland.
His life was celebrated with a reception in the Slovakian embassy in October.
In his room at St John’s House nursing home in Ballsbridge, there are pictures of him with President Michael D Higgins, a man he greatly admires, according to Joe’s son Peter Veselsky.
Many in the Jewish community in Ireland say President Higgins should stay away from Sunday’s memorial event run by the Holocaust Education Trust in the Mansion House because of his criticisms of Israel.
However, Peter Veselsky said his father, when he was still able to speak last year, expressed a view that the Israeli government had “gone too far in Gaza”.
“He was shocked by the October 7th attacks, but he thought the response was even worse,” Mr Veselsky said. “That’s what he said to me and nobody could accuse him of being anti-Semitic.”
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