Eva Mosnáková

“In Brno I experienced the German occupation. It was a tough day. I was 9 years old. The weather was bad, damp, and foggy. It drizzled. German troops were rolling down the streets; cavalry, infantry. Aunt Maři was standing by the window, crying. She did not send me to school, it was too dangerous. Later, on my way to school (back at Veveří, before my aunt moved), there was a military warehouse guarded by German soldiers. Being afraid, I chose to cross the road to avoid them. I used to walk to my piano lessons past the Kaunicovy koleje (dormitories). Those fateful dorms, where my father once was a student, became a prison. Because universities were closed down, students were taken to forced work in Germany and if not, then they were arrested. People were imprisoned in the dormitories. And there were too many. Walking to my music lesson I was passing by the dorms and I saw a courtyard and a fence around it. And in front of the fence, walking around, there were ladies, spouses of the imprisoned, hoping their husbands or brothers or sons would see them and understand they were thinking about them. They did not know that if a prisoner showed up in the window, shooting would follow.”

“So after the liberation we were waiting until things calmed down and as the front was moving further towards Bratislava, we tried to work out what to do next. Our apartment was completely robbed. We had nothing left. Mrs. Kirtová, whom I stayed with when I studied at my middle school in Nitra, opened her apartment up to those who were homeless. It wasn´t just our family, there were a lot of us. Because not only did people start arriving from their hidings, but also from concentration camps and they had nowhere to go. Their apartments and houses were mostly occupied by people who, through aryanization, seized the property of those who had been deported to concentration camps. And, they did not like to see the people come back, honor to exceptions. Because some gave everything back and sheltered the returnees. Our place was robbed, so we got accommodated in Nitra. My father started to look for work. Young people of my age and older started to connect socially, there were boys arriving from the uprising, boys and girls arriving from concentration camps. I knew many of them and they were deeply hurt. There were young people, whose parents never came back and who were yanked out of their parents’ arms, and whose parents ended up in gas chambers. There were too many tragedies and I started to realize what the Holocaust in its breadth and depth actually means.”