Makóny couple.
Ján Makóny and his wife Anna Makónyová were awarded the Righteous Among the Nations award in September 2022.
Gejza and Vojtech's parents and their sister were deported, and their fate remains unknown. The brothers were both engineers, which helped them to evade deportation, as their professions were vital to the state. However, they were recruited to a semi-military unit called the "Sixth battalion". The unit members were Jewish people of recruitment age who performed various support tasks for the Slovak army.
After the battalion was disbanded in 1943, Vojtech was assigned as a civilian employee to the National Defense Labor Command service. As an irreplaceable expert in the field of construction, he participated as a Military Construction Supervisor in the building of Tri Duby Airport. He worked as a construction manager in Garansek (now Hronsek) near Banská Bystrica.
On October 30, 1944, along with 55 other Jews who had remained in the Ministry of National Defense service until then, Vojtech found himself on the list of unnecessary civilian employees. He fled to the mountains around the village of Pršany to join the organized units of the partisans. When he could not make contact with them, he returned to Garansek. There he turned for help from the Makony family. They hid Vojtech, his brother Gejza and Gejza's wife Alžbeta in a hayloft and provided them with food until the liberation. By doing this, they saved their lives.
All three rescued survived the war. Gejza and Alžbeta immigrated to Israel with their 4-year-old daughter Anna; later, their second daughter Esti was born there. Vojtech married a young Jewish woman whose family had been murdered. After the wedding, they changed their surname and moved to Košice, where their children still live with their families.
