"I was helped by one priest, who was a friend of the then president Dr Tiso, who knew my father, because they had been playing cards together every evening."
Peter (Shlomo) Peleg, an Israeli engineer in retirement, was born in 1925 in Vienna. His parents however lived permanently in Čadca in Western Slovakia, where he also grew up. His father was a doctor employed in the Czechoslovak State Railways. Mr. Peleg studied a local grammar school, but he was not allowed to complete it on the grounds of his race. From 1942 to the summer of 1943 he was working under a false identity for the water building authority. From July 1943 to August 1944 he was registered under his own name as a local Jew in Oščadnica (Čadca district). In 1944 he briefly joined the Slovak National Uprising, at the turn of 1944 and 1945 he and his parents were hiding from the Nazis in the mountains. After the war he studied in Prague, in January 1949 left for Israel. After several years in a kibbutz he further studied and then worked as a planning engineer. After his retirement he began pursuing his interest in medieval history - in crusades to the Holy Land.
