Marie Vítovcová

“One of us told the other one, ‘Your mum came with us.’ And she said, ‘My mum came? And where is she?’ And we said, ‘She’s not with us, she’s in the camp with women and children.’ And she said, ‘There’s no such camp. If she came with you and is not with you, then she went to a gas chamber.’ I broke down then. It was something horrible. There were 1,500 of us, many small children and young girls, and they selected 190 of us for work and all the others were sent to gas chambers.”

“In July, in 1943, they discovered a radio in Theresienstadt. It was terrible… They arrested many people who went to the fortress, they were not executed here, and only people over fifty could stay with Ghettowache. My dad was forty-eight. He was not then and was sent for manual labour. When transports of men departed, he was included. He told me, ‘Never volunteer for anything. You take care, you are…’ So we didn’t volunteer. But in the very next transport, when the first three left, we were included. But we were included as a reserve. So we didn’t leave, but we had the first numbers – my mum was 13, I was 14 and Soňa was 15 – for the next transport to Auschwitz. But we didn’t know where we were going, not at all.”

“There were soldiers with dogs. The striped men, the prisoners, they ran to the train, opened the doors and shouted, ‘Get out, quickly get out. Leave your luggage here, you’ll get it later, quickly get out.’ Everybody did their best as the shouting makes you not to stop. We had to stand in queues by five and walk. We said, my mum and I, that perhaps my father would await us there. But nothing like that happened. We didn’t look around us, we just walked, there were three SS men, one pointed at me and showed to the right, not for the others though. There was my distant cousin with us, she too was sent right and she wanted to take her mum along, but someone shouted at her. My mum came to the SS man and told him that I was her daughter, whether I could go with her, but he just said, ‘Get lost!’. And this was when we saw one another for the last time.”

“And we rejoiced that it was the end of the war. The baker had to give us… We were visited in the camp by Poles with vodka and we were afraid, so we walked into the village and moved, four of us, into a house which was empty. We made a fire in the bathroom, took a bath, found potatoes and carrots in the cellar, a baker had to give us a loaf of bread. And then we said that we would go home. So we set out on a journey. I used to remember this as the most beautiful thing that occurred to me. It was spring, trees were in bloom, we walked and were free.”

“I thought that when I returned to Prague I would kiss the ground. I did nothing of the sort. We came tired and I said I would go home, where we used to live. We had no money. We could take the tram but no one told us. I walked with Andula to a friend of hers, then we parted. And I took the tram, or didn’t… I didn’t I walked. I came home, where we used to live, where now lived other people – we called them uncle and aunt, but they were not relatives, they were friends of our parents. I walked to the door and rang the bell. They said they spoke to someone who had told them I was coming home. They said, ‘Where are the others?’ And this was the first time I started crying.”