“When (my aunt) returned from concentration camp, she could’ve had a baby three times, but her inners were so weak, that when three, four, five months pregnant, she had to even go to hospital, and she lost the baby. She never wanted to speak of her experiences, I just know one thing. I have to skip forward to 1988, when I succeeded in putting her into a rest home in Prague 6, Šolínov, she was in a general ward. They moved her, the poor thing, from one room to another, because the patients complained about her. She was normal during the day, but in the night, when her socially-trained reason stopped working, she screamed like awful. All the orders they’d been given at roll call and so on...”
“Who managed to survive the horror of concentration camp, they had to be tough nuts. Anyone who was too sensitive - a poet say, or someone like that, they wouldn’t be capable of it. They had to be people able to fight for their lives, for them to survive.”
“They were shooting them, but she, because she was smaller, she wasn’t hit, but she was covered by others, by the larger ones. British soldiers under the heap later on, and they took her to the British hospital in Bergen-Belsen, where she underwent a typhus infection. She returned completely bald, the hair falls off after typhus, or something. She then grew black, sparkly hair, like she didn’t even have before. She came to Prague. Someone phoned us, we hadn’t changed the number, and she’d remembered it the whole time. It was on about the 15th of July 1945 when they phoned us that there’s a hospital train stopped in Smíchov Station, and that we have a relative there, so we should go pick her up.”
“I was saved by one Mr Chmelař, who we used to shop at. I went to him on Friday, on that 15th of February 1945, and I told him I was hungry, I hadn’t any tickets, hadn’t any money. If someone was taking my tickets, or if they were joined with Mum’s, I don’t know. He gave me a bit of bread and told me I could come back on Monday, that he’d save me something. So Mr Chmelař helped me, it was such a little shop, now it’s in Patočkova, that used to be Pioneer Street. He always assured me that Mum would pay it, that she’d get back, that it wouldn’t be long.”
Věra Dulová was born on the 31st of March 1935. Her mother and her aunt were of Jewish descent, her father, an Austrian, converted to Judaism so he could marry. During World War II, Vera’s Aunt Amálie was deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp, and later to Bergen-Belsen. Věra’s father was arrested by the Gestapo in 1943 for marrying a Jew; he spent the following two years in a penitentiary in Bernau. Towards the end of the war, Věra’s mother was taken away to a concentration camp, and the ten-year-old girl was left alone in Prague for almost four months. In 1945 the whole family was happily reunited. Věra Dulová died on May 17th, 2017.
