“It was normal coexistence. In the borderland we did not feel that we would be different than the others and they did not treat us in a different or bad way. Before Heinlein’s rise, life here was quite ordinary.”
“I was determined to try to help overcome Hitler so that we might possibly return to Czechoslovakia. We left our grandmother there, she died in Terezín. So I simply got this idea to do something for it, something that will be within my power. I waited till I was seventeen and a half. And that day in the morning I went there, I remember that I said: ´I would still make it!´ And I did.”
“I think we were the only Jews who were travelling at that time. We had to attend long interviews in Prague. My mother had great problems; she was summoned to the Gestapo station, and so on. They tried to convince her not to leave; they were telling her that nothing would happen to her here. But she insisted on emigration, and so we eventually managed to leave in the last week of April 1939.”
“As for myself, I cannot say I would have any negative war experiences. While we were in London for a short time, we did experience air raids, that’s true. We had to spend every night in a shelter – during the battle of Britain. But later, when I was in the RAF, we were mostly in small towns, or even in remote places where the radio stations were located. We did not have many air raids there. So I cannot say I have any bad memories.”
“Each of us had one suitcase, only the essential personal belongings. I remember we bought three salamis for my father, we wanted to bring them to him. But we were so hungry that we ate them all before we arrived there, and the poor Daddy did not get anything.”
“It was quite interesting, and when you are young, you don’t even realize that such terribly serious things are going on. Sometimes, we would even joke about it.”
I fought the Germans personally. All of the Germans, does not matter which ones I was brought up in the traditional way, we were taught the eye for an eye - tooth for a tooth. To me, all Germans were bad
Edith Weitzenová, private in retirement, was born May 7th 1924 in Dresden in a Jewish German-speaking family. In 1930, the family moved to Liberec in the Czech borderland, and Mrs. Weitzenová attended a German school there. In reaction to rising anti-Semitic mood in the border regions in the late 1930s the family moved to Prague. The parents were subsequently moved to a refugee camp near Kladno. Edith and her younger brother were sent to children’s homes, each of them to a different one. Thanks to intercession from the party’s leader Wenzel Jaksch, her father, a German Social Democratic Party member, emigrated to Great Britain. The rest of the family followed him after two months. Mrs. Weitzenová worked there together with her mother, but after a short time she joined the British army. Thanks to her language abilities, she was assigned to the RAF to the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF). She served in a radio station on the British east coast where she was monitoring the communication of German air force. During the war, she married a Scottish radio operator; however, the marriage did not last long, and after the divorce she returned to Czechoslovakia to nurse her ill mother. After February 1948, Weitzenová was in prison for a short time, but she did not suffer further persecution. She remarried in Czechoslovakia. She had been working in an accounting department of a food-processing company in Liberec till her retirement. She died in 2011.
