Mgr. Petr Pilný

“We were returning from Olšany, from the Jewish cemetery, going downhill to Vršovice. It was hot and we stopped in Kodaňská Street; there was a pub called U Miloše on the corner. My parents went to buy me a lemonade. Dad and I stood on the walkway and mum walked into the pub and brought out a lemonade for us to drink. That was common practice. At the time, I had no idea that they had to do it this way – had dad walked into the pub wearing his David’s star, the pubkeeper would kick him out. They were not allowed to let Jews in! But to me, it seemed obvious: mum who was not wearing the star went in and bought the lemonade – and dad and I waited on the walkway and that’s where we had a drink. I only realised all of that much later.”

“I remember my aunt Elsa, the aunt Elsa whose goodbye letters I still keep. She was sitting in our place wearing mum’s colourful bathrobe, it was shortly before her deportation, and she told me: ‘Pete, I will come back to you with aunt Malva and grandma one day. And we will all go to Janovice and we’ll say to Mrs Provazníková: Mrs Provazníková, you better give the garden and the dwarves back to aunt Elsa!’ I do remember this. I may have been four years old at the time.” – “Was that a family house that someone took…?” – “It was a beautiful villa where she had an apartment on the ground floor and a surgery with a waiting room on the first floor. A beautiful, gorgeous villa with a beautiful garden, including garden dwarves too, you see? Mrs Provazníková was the aryaniser, the people who were all too happy to receive a house from Jews who had to move away, who were deported.”

“When I was about twenty-five, I was sitting with my dad – my military service was already over – and I told him: ‘Come, let’s take a trip to Terezín together. You can tell me how it was back then.’ We did not talk about it much. So we got our motorcycle and went to Terezín, he would show me around and say: ‘I lived here in these barracks; then they relocated me from the Hannover Barracks to the Dresden Barracks’ or where – I don’t recall. We also came to the infamous blind track where they boarded transports between the houses. My grandma passed through there as did my two aunts and then my brother I talked about, but when my dad was there the transports would not leave – they would arrive from the east. Germans were withdrawing them from the Polish concentration camps as the Red Army progressed. My dad’s task at the time was unloading those lucky and unlucky ones who came back from the eastern camps. Suddenly, he asked me: ‘Remember Pepík Lévy?’ – ‘I do, I would ride his back in Hagibor.’ Dad said: ‘I pulled dead Pepík Lévy from the car here.’”

“When I was six, that was early February 1945, my dad was on the last or last-but-one transport to Terezín. I was to go with him but my parents agreed to pretend that they were separated, they got some people they knew, and mum and I went to Malešov near Kutná Hora. There, they taught me that my name was Picka – you see, my name was not Pilný, my name was Pick. Many people who survived the holocaust changed their names to get a different identity. So my name was Picka and my dad was working in the Reich. That’s how I was hiding. There is an institution called the Hidden Child, I went to see them once, but that’s another story.”

“My grandma, my two aunts – dad’s sisters and my cousin were deported in forty two. In the evening, I would pray: ‘Angel of God, my guardian dear, to whom his love commits me here’ and so forth. And I would end: ‘Our Lord in Heaven, let Grandma Růžena, aunt Malva and aunt Elza and Ota return to us. Amen.’ What more should I say?”