Hana Adlerová

“In October 1944 the Germans were worried about the Russians’ advance. So they decided to evacuate the region of northern Norway called Finnmark, and they burnt everything. Not many people know about it nowadays, but the whole northern part of Norway was scorched. Here and there a church remained, otherwise everything was burnt and the inhabitants were expelled. Of course, we were evacuated among the patients too, and we came by boat to Trondheim. There, we got in touch with some partisans, who told us we mustn’t go on, because the Gestapo was waiting for us in Oslo. And they helped us get to Sweden. They led us across the Swedish borders by night, it was in November 1944, during a snowstorm. Before that they’d sent us from one partisan to the other. They took us from Trondheim back north by train. We slept in a train station that was managed by one of the partisans. Then he took us to the mines, where we slept in someone’s attic, then we went to the borders on foot. Some other partisans told us the borders had been bolstered by a new German garrison. We had to decide whether to risk it and cross here, or to go around and spend another on the road. Mum decided we’d risk it, so we went. Seeing that the weather was bad, I reckon the soldiers slept, and that very night we crossed over into Sweden.”

“I’d rather not speak about our standing after our return from exile. People treated us variously. I remember going by train after the war with my cousin, who had spent the war in England thanks to Winton. She spoke English. And someone in the compartment remarked: ‘Well lookie, before the war the Jews spoke German, and now they speak English.’ It was unpleasant, so you remember that. But it was okay overall. My father was a specialist, so people accepted him. It was difficult with ordinary people, for whom Jews were still a foreign element. When they found out where we were during the war, they begrudged us that we’d fled. Those are the things that people see. The fact that we owned a house before the war, which we didn’t get back, that they didn’t see...”