Susanne Medas

(She reads her father's letter). "’On Friday we expedited the package’. He meant they sent off the package. In English, no one says to expedite. You know, it's very sad for me. I was a silly girl. I didn’t realize that my parents were very poor when they were in Norway. They had no income, were dependent on the Red Cross and the Jewish Refugee Committee. I wrote them that I needed things that I knew they had taken with them to Norway. But I feel very bad, because they had to pay the postage ... It was a difficult time."

"However, in 1939, there was the occupation of Czechoslovakia. The man who led the international camp in England - he was also a socialist or a social democrat and had contacts with adults who were with us in England. And he knew what was going on. He wrote a letter that I can show you. He asked English families - working class families, they were not rich men - to take some children on accommodation. Mr. Winton had the opportunity to bring children to England, but only if he had secured family accommodation so that it would incur no costs."

"We were Jews and Jews usually didn’t want to return to Germany. But my father and his colleagues wanted to return to Germany. They didn’t know back in 1933 that there will be a war. My father would never have thought that we would emigrate to America. We stayed in Prague and he thought it would be good if I went to a German school. I went to the Lyceum in Charvátova Street in Prague at the Národní třída Avenue."

"Then there were the letters of the Red Cross. Open letters you could write but only in twenty-five words. We were not allowed to write them personally, have you seen one of them? I can show you, I have five of them. We went to the office in Cambridge, where we wrote a message to our parents in twenty-five words, including the address. That’s not an awful lot, so you couldn’t really make it a long letter. Then we submitted it to some official, some volunteer, who then transcribed the letter on a different piece of paper with the heading of the Red Cross. This letter was sent to Norway to the office of the Red Cross. There, my parents could read the letter and could send an answer on the other side of it. The reason for this was that in this way there was no chance of sending some hidden message in between the lines."

"My name is Susanne Medasová, née Bernstein. I was born in Berlin in 1923, so I'm now ninety years old. My father was a journalist and a political editor. He was a journalist and covered exclusively politics. In March 1933, the newspaper was banned. The editors fled, at least those of them who could. If they remained in Germany, they were among the first ones to be taken to Dachau. At the time, Dachau was designated for political prisoners. Fortunately, my mother came from the Jizerské hory Mountains and my father was originally from Vienna."