Anna Tybitanclová

"And then in Lille they put us on a train, what they called cattle cars back then. They were the same wagons that were used to transport people to the concentration camps. So we slept there on straw. That train journey... that was kind of the worst experience, because we went through bombed-out Germany for eleven days. The Germans didn't like to see us when they found out we were from France, they were allies actually. So they didn't like to see us and we were the first emigration train. They were fixing the tracks in front of us, my sister even told me, because she's five years older than me, so she remembered that they were even fixing the bridge in front of us and there were Germans standing at the bottom and they were watching with interest to see if we were going to fall off the bridge or not. And the travelling on that train... there were maybe four or five families in one carriage and we slept on straw. I don't remember where they got food, but there was a lot of construction in Germany when the rails hadn't been fixed yet. And it happened, for example, that the train stopped in the night, the children jumped out, the mothers jumped out of the cars because they needed to. And the train suddenly whistled and started moving. So there were a lot of people left behind, but it was said that the Red Cross then picked them up and took them where they needed to go."

"When my father returned from captivity, the Germans released them. First of all, I didn't want to see him at all, so when they told me that he was my dad, I said, 'No, my dad's over there,' and I showed them a picture of him that my mum had in a frame." - "You didn't really know him at all, Daddy." - "No. I didn't remember. Even though we have a picture of us as a family, but I was very small and I didn't remember him at all. Well, but the way the bombing was, a lot of it, I know that Daddy, still with the other guys, would go to the places where the houses were broken down and help, how should I put it... pull out the dead that were in the rubble. And he said, I probably heard this even if I should not have, that when they were taking these people, they were mostly all burned and they were kind of small. They were burned. So that's the only way I remember - and I also remember my grandmother taking my older sister and they went to visit my aunt who lived in the next town and they experienced the afternoon bombing. My sister remembered that my grandmother pushed her, lay down on her - and my sister still remembers how the ground was shaking. How the bombs fell on those houses."