Hermína Domácí

"When I first came to the farmhouse in 1992, around the time of the restitution, I met a lady who was a classmate of mine back then. And she said to me, 'As you were moving in then, you were leading your brother by the hand and picking up what had fallen from the wagon into the snow. And then your arms were full and you did not know how to do it. And we had a good laugh as you were picking it up.' And I said, 'Well, how come you are living here in a farmhouse, in houses that were for those who are paid in kind? After all you had a house in the middle of the village where the national committee was.' So, there were still some houses for these people and they had one of those. And she said, 'Well, am I crazy to renovate a house? Here they have to do it all for me. So, I sold the house and I am living here.' You can see the morale from that."

"When we were living in Vinohrady, towards the end of the war there were air raids, so the horn blew and we had to quickly go to the cellar. Well, it was a big cellar under the apartment building. People from other houses came there and sat on makeshift benches. It was always several hours, old people, young people, children. It was terribly unpleasant, we could hear the rumbling. Luckily, we got out of the cave-in. There was a synagogue across the street, coincidentally it fell on the synagogue, it demolished it. A lot of bricks were falling in the basement and it was not so fatal that we would suffocate."

"Ervín ended up in a concentration camp. He went through all those infamous camps and ended up in Auschwitz. He survived because he was assigned to a commando unit that put those dead people in the oven, imagine that, that service. And he told me that he only survived because those people usually kept a crust of bread somewhere in their pocket for the worst time. So, he and his colleagues would eat these leftovers out of those pockets."

"So, my father was drafted into a labour camp and my mother was awfully brave. They both spoke German very well because they were both very educated. My mother managed to bribe a Gestapo man, who then let her go to see my father in some cellar in Prague 6, where they were interned, to say goodbye to him. Then we continued to live in that General Syrový’s Vinohrady apartment, and my father and his colleagues were sent to various places in Poland and later in Germany, working in underground factories, building underground munitions factories. But under terrible conditions – up to their chests in water. And my father, fortunately, had the foresight to have his tonsils removed voluntarily before he went to the concentration camp, because by then he had tonsillitis very often. And that saved him from being so delicate."

"To get back to General Syrový, he was like a grandfather to me, he held me on his lap and was a terribly kind man. But after the revolution he was sentenced to twenty-three years and he was in prison the whole time, and he was released in the sixties about two years earlier. And he did not have an apartment or any possessions or clothes other than what he left prison with. So, I remember my grandmother gave him some of my grandfather's clothes at that time. And he was working as a night watchman and living in a lodging house. And he was about, I do not know, seventy-three or something like that. But I know he was kind. That for example he brought some nice apple or some fruit, probably from some of these government receptions or I do not know what, I do not know. But you would think a strange little child must get on the nerves of an old man, but he was always awfully kind. He would sit on the carpet with me and play with me and my dolls, which must have annoyed him terribly. But he was kind enough to do it."