Annelore Finková

"Still in Germany, I saw his number..." - "He had a number tatooed on his forearm?" - "Well, of course. From the concentration camp. He spent a year with his mum in Terezín. He only met his father a year later in Auschwitz. Your people surely know that the youth there played theater. My husband witnessed all of this in Terezín. At the beginning, when people asked him: 'Harry, why do you have a number on your forearm?', he would say: 'Oh, that was just childhood silliness.' He hadn't spoken about it."

"We had to get out of the house and there were the Russian soldiers armed with rifles, driving us out. We were not allowed to stay, and so we went in the direction of Germany. Back then, it was only one Germany - no East and West yet. It was terribly cold, it must have been January or February. Mum went along, my three-years-older brother, I was five. He helped drive me on the sledge. Often, we took the cattle trains - the same that used to go to Auschwitz. According to mum's recollections, it must have been terrible. There was no toilet, people were packed in. Then we had to get out. We walked more than half of the way on foot in the snow."

"They were in Erfurt and had coal, a farm and such things. My mum kept the address in the memory. We wanted to go there, I guess they made the arrangements with my mum. Half of the way, mum had to take me through deep snow. There were plenty of dead people there lying on the road. I wasn't able to walk anymore, I contaiged typhus and pneumonia. There were dead bodies on the side, I still recall that, it was nasty. My mum took the sledge because she didn't know what else to do with me. I had severe fever. She buried a dead child in the snow, and took the sledge to drive me further. It must have been a horrible journey. I know this from their memories. And we ended up here in Schwarzenberg-Lichtenberg, not far from here in Germany. There, we were accommodated in a private home. The landlady's name was Stein, she had two daughters. Her husband was also in the war but she already knew he was dead."

"My mum said that at the beginning, they were a bit... But they made room for us. The farmers were terrible, they took everything they had. 'You've gotten milk and now you have to work to make it up.' Initially, it was a catastrophy but as they'd gotten to know us, my mum found a job, there was no trouble. To the contrary, the boys came over and said: 'Anne, we need sugar to make wine, we have plenty of fruit. I will get you some, and then when we slaughter a pig, you will get some of it.' Back then, they made canned meat. For a while, I attended a village school and then moved to Bad Lausitz to my aunt's."