Mechel Hoch, born around 1899, was an Orthodox Jew and Yiddish-speaking father from a poor family in Czechoslovakia. He married Hannah Slomowitz, and they resided in the mountain village of Slatinské Doly (now Solotvyno, Ukraine), where they raised a large family of seven children in poverty, including their son Ján Ludvík Hyman Binyamin Hoch, later known as Robert Maxwell, born on June 10, 1923. Mechel Hoch perished in 1943 during the Holocaust, along with his wife and most of their children, while Robert Maxwell was the sole family survivor who fled to Britain.