Slovakia was allied with the German Reich, and introduced anti-Jewish laws in 1939. From then on, 14-year-old Jana Gráfová from Bratislava and her family were persecuted. She was no longer allowed to attend a state school, had to wear a yellow star, and her family had to move into a smaller apartment.
In 1942 Jana’s brother Jiří Gráf was taken to the Maly Trostinets extermination site in German-occupied Belorussia and murdered. The German occupation of Slovakia in the fall of 1944 placed the rest of the family in danger of deportation. Pavel Čermák, a friend of the family, found a hiding place for Jana Gráfová in a Protestant orphanage in Modra. The institution was run by Pastor Július Dérer.
At the end of 1944, German soldiers and a combat group of the Slovak Hlinka party searched the orphanage and the adjoining school. Jana Gráfová went undiscovered during the raid. She lived in the institution, posing as a Christian girl, until her liberation in May 1945. Jana’s brother Pavel Gráf survived imprisonment in Buchenwald concentration camp; their parents were deported and murdered in 1944.