“The boat was full of people, but we were not seasick. It was a big ship, and thus it did not sway so much. We were assigned to a reserve (…) company. Things already became serious there: we were being sent into attack when needed. It was a short distance from Dunkerque. (…) When they needed to have something done, we would go there.”
“I considered it necessary to find my sister, who was already married at that time and I knew that she was pregnant. I was not really seeing her, because I did not have money for it. She lived in a different place. But I did start looking for her. Obviously, she was no longer living in the same place, she had changed her address several times, because she would always just stay for a short time. She had a fourteen-day-old baby girl. Her husband had fled earlier, he felt to be in greater danger than her, because he was an Austrian refugee, and I thus found my sister in a Copenhagen suburb in a small villa, alone and totally desperate, with a fourteen-day old girl, a little baby, and we took her with us.”
“[A month or] less than six weeks before the end of the war we were taken out of the reserve company and assigned to the second battalion, second company. The commander was certain captain [Arnošt] Chlup. In Dunkerque we experienced real combat situations. I vividly remember the last action, which I thought was special because it took place on May 8th, at the time where the first capitulation had been already signed. It was signed in Berlin on the eighth, but at Dunkerque it was signed on the ninth by a local German, and on the eighth they still went to shoot there.”
“Apart from that, Danish acts of sabotage were on the rise, they were blowing up rail lines, the Englishmen were bombing the place, and so on. It began to look more militaristic. It began to seem that Denmark would be affected by the war as well. When you consider what the war situation was like, Hitler had been amassing total victories everywhere up to 1943, and then there was a certain turning point at the beginning of 1943. There was Stalingrad, there was the front in Africa, and then there was the anticipated invasion to Italy.”
“On the second or third day I was issued with work clothes and I began my regular work on an agricultural farm. Basically, I got to do all kinds of work that could be done there. The farm was managed very efficiently, and it was very orderly, something completely different from what I used to see around Vlachovo Březí. It was like an industrial factory, so to speak.”
JUDr. Arnošt Lederer was born on May 14, 1924 in Vlachovo Březí. He attended the elementary school in his native town and then he continued at the grammar school in Prachatice. As a young boy he attended the Zionist group Tchelet lavan. The grammar school in Prachatice was closed down after the occupation of the borderlands on September 29, 1938 and Arnošt was commuting for several months to Strakonice and Vodňany which lay further away. In May 1939 he was admitted to the retraining course of Jewish youth in Prague (Aliyah), a Zionist school which prepared students for emigration to Palestine. Due to restrictions on visas to Palestine, which was under the British authority at that time, the children were to wait in a neutral country in the mean time. On October 10, 1939, Arnošt Lederer left with the first transport bound for Denmark, and his sister followed him later. He worked at farms and in a dairy on the island Sjælland. In 1943 the Nazi pressure upon Denmark escalated and the Danish government stepped down. The country was taken over by the occupying forces and Danish Jews were to be transported to concentration camps. The Danish however managed to warn the local Jews about the danger of transports. In October 1943, Arnošt Lederer thus sailed to Sweden with his wife Zuzana, who was a Czech Jew, and with his sister and her little baby. While in Sweden, on January 25, 1944 he decided to join the Czechoslovak resistance on the western front. He flew to England where he was being investigated from August to December 1944, and on December 19, 1944 he was drafted to the 1st Czechoslovak Independent Armoured Brigade. He went through basic training in Chalkwell near Southend-On-Sea and then he was transferred to the north of France where he participated in the fighting for Dunkerque. When the war ended, he discovered that apart from two persons who had likewise fought abroad, nobody else of his large family has survived. He later completed his grammar school studies and then graduated from the Law Faculty in Prague. He worked as an economist. Arnošt Lederer and his wife now live in Prague.
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