Eva Merclová

"We greeted my grandmother, and they immediately came and told us we were going to see my mother. That they were taking us to see my mom. Well, maybe we even believed it for a while. And I remember this moment, we were going up the Chotek road, today it's Malostranská, up the Chotek road. We were crying, after all, we were a little bit... I don't know if we didn't believe them, but it was like - we left my grandmother on the platform because they took us right away from the platform. And I remember the moment when we were going up that, as that Chotek road turns up there, a tram went by. I think the Gestapo car was quite recognizable because the Gestapo men were sitting in the front, and two crying children were sitting in the back."

"So we were supposed to go to them on vacation, and we were supposed to leave the next day. I was getting ready with my mom... We were in the bedroom where my mom was getting the luggage ready. And because we were staying in a villa with a garden, where we could play, Mummy left the key in the door so we wouldn't ring it all the time. We always wanted something, a drink here, something there... And so I was in the bedroom with my mother, where we were putting things in the suitcases, and suddenly the door from the bedroom opened, and there were three men dressed in green uniforms, and they introduced themselves as Geheime Staatspolizei. That's how they introduced themselves, I remember. I can see the moment - my mother turning pale. Then they put chains on her hands, and I didn't see them take her away anymore because there was a family of caretakers living downstairs and their daughter, they had two daughters, and one was a year older than me, and I was good friends with her, so I immediately ran to the Kadeřábek family and told Mrs Kadeřábek that the Gestapo had come to us. And she gave me one crown, and said, 'Run and tell your father not to come home,' because it was afternoon, about half past three, and he was coming home around four o'clock, and she thought that he might come home and fall into the clutches of the Gestapo. But unfortunately, by the time I called there, the Gestapo was already there in his office."

"Daddy had been expecting it. Daddy was quite a high-ranking Sokol official, he was the deputy head of Barak County, and immediately from the beginning of the war, they set up an organization, I think it was called Jindra, and they mainly helped the families of those where the breadwinners had already been arrested. I think Daddy helped a lot financially. So, every now and then, they wouldn't address or talk about anything in front of us, but they would always mention that somebody had been arrested, which maybe I heard or I was around, and I could understand. These moments when the Gestapo was mentioned... And a German used to come to teach me, and another classmate of mine came to be taught by this German language teacher who came to our home. I learned German from about ten years old, so two years. I was arrested at eleven. And every now and then, something about the Gestapo came up. I had this feeling inside me that I was afraid...Because the teacher described it exactly - how somebody I knew got arrested, and she said a green car came, and so I knew that the Gestapo had a green car. And I remember that feeling of fear that the green car wouldn't come and the Gestapo would come. And that's exactly how it happened."

“In the beginning, we were imprisoned in Jenerálka, which is a little chateau in Prague 6. The Gestapo took us there gradually. Me and my sister were taken there on August 28 and by then, there were already some five kids whose parents had been arrested. The Gestapo arrested the parents and brought the kids there. In our case, we weren’t brought there right after the arrest of our parents. My parents were arrested on July 14 and we were left to spend the holidays with my grandparents. When we came back on that August 28, my uncle, grandmother and the Gestapo were waiting for us at the train station. So they picked us up at that train station more than a month after they had arrested our parents. Then they took us to Jenerálka and they were subsequently bringing other kids there. Until November 1942, we were 45 kids there.”

“It was on the broadcast, they announced that the children would come back on 12 May, so their relatives came to pick them up. Fortunately we had a grandmother who took care of us. As I told you she had a villa in Žižkov where we later lived and we also graduated. We were very lucky that we've had a grandmother ... She was sixty-four when we came back. From today's perspective, this is not an incredibly high age, but anyway, if you consider that she had to raise two girls, fourteen and eleven years old ... Sometimes it happened that the siblings were split up into different families, although related ones. So, for instance, one of them would end up in one parent’s family and the other one in the family of the other parent. Sometimes, they weren’t treated very well. Some of them didn’t have an easy life in their new families.”

Interviewer: “Did you know General Klapálek?” Mrs. Merclová: “Klapálek, General Hasal, yes, I told. Mrs. Hasal was there with her daughter and they came to our place to clean up so we would chat a bit every now and then. I also got to know Mrs. Klapálková, her name was Olga and they called her ‘Páťa’. We even met long after the war. We all secretly tried to keep in touch. Professor Marková, who was interned there but was charged with overseeing the Kinderheim at the same time. The same is true for professor Louda who was responsible for overseeing the boys. He only stayed there for a short time. Eventually, there was aunt Šperlová. I mean we called her aunt because she was very close to us all. She was a great lady and really had a heart for us. She became a haven for many of us there.”

“The camp in Svatobořice was set up as a hostage camp for the relatives of those soldiers who went to abroad to fight Nazism in foreign armies. The families of General Hasal, Klapálek and other outstanding personalities. They even held the brother of Mr. Voskovec there. When the camp was established, there was also a Jewish-house in the corner of the camp and they allegedly treated the Jews terribly. They commander was a man called ‘Punťa’. He was a really cruel man. When I came there, he had already been reassigned somewhere else. The new commander was Schuster and he was much more humane. I remember that once he walked into the Kinderheim, which was an emergency housing located in one corner of the camp, and he would tell good-night stories to the children. I was eleven years old then and my sister was eight. He tried to remain a human. He prevented all the atrocities that had been common place there before.”