Hana Fousová

"I broke my knee the other day, we were kind of chasing the kids around, and my mom told us to stop running. So we were running, and then I broke my knee, so she called me out again. And then I had scabs on it, and when we were together that last night, she kept kissing my knees, those scabs, so I wouldn't be mad at her for being like that to me. And I know I kept saying, 'Leave me alone, I want to sleep.' Or no, I didn’t say leave me alone, but I want to sleep because she was crying and kissing me all the time and I was like, 'I want to sleep, I want to sleep.' But they left at five o'clock, so we went early in the morning. No one was allowed at the station, except for me and then another, the daughter of one of my mother's friends, who was ten years older than me, so she was 18 at the time. So we went there together, and then I went to her house with her. And then somehow I was out and the kids were coming home from school, and I felt so important that I didn't have to be in school. I was proud of it. I didn't get it at all."

"In 1942, my mother had to go to Terezin. It was so chaotic because there were more Jewish residents in Mestec, including the children I was playing with. Because they weren't allowed to go to school, someone secretly taught them in a closed store. So I went there to study with them, too. And then all the Jews got summoned to transport, that was after Heydrich, after the assassination. And my mom wasn’t called there because I was little, I was eight, so they said I was protecting her. That was Wednesday, June 10, and on Sunday, mom got a telegram to come with the others. From the letter she wrote to her brother, she's just saying that she called cologne, what does that mean, she shouldn't have gone, and they said, 'Come, this is where it's going to be explained.' So she went with everyone else, but now she had nowhere to leave me. I didn't have siblings, but we didn't have anyone. My mother had a girlfriend that I called aunt, and I loved her so much, I'd be there right away, from the minute. But her husband was a lawyer, he had a law firm, and they said they couldn't marry me, that maybe he'd have to close the office, so I can't be with them. So I remained unprincipled as such. So I slept at this aunt's for 14 days so I could finish school, I went to second grade. Then came my uncle, who I had never seen before, and that was my mother's sister's husband, or brother-in-law. But the nurse had already died a year before. I've never seen him before. And then he picked me up and drove me to his, I don't know if it was my parents or my mother, I don't know where it was, what the village was called. I've never seen these people before, so he drove me there at the end of June."

"All right, I started flying. But then, after about two years, they suddenly picked me up. Straight away, I remember that like I did today when I flew in from Moscow. Now they picked me up and took me to Bartholomew.' And now they started on me as psychologically, that I wanted to go to study and that I didn't go and that maybe I could. And I said, 'Well, I don't want to anymore.' Well, as a result, they'd need some information about what the flying staff were doing. I said, 'I've only been flying for about four months, I don't know them.' And they said, 'Well, that's how you know them.' Well, then when they saw they weren't going to move me, they got me to sign a card so I wouldn't talk about it, that I was there what they wanted and all. So I signed it."

"Then she didn't come back after the war. There was always someone ringing the bell, now they were walking... different relatives were coming back. And I always said, 'That's Mom!' And I flew down that gallery to open the door. And then... I realized that later, no one said anything to me, but they looked at each other so strangely. So I slowly stopped saying it, it went to the lost, and my mother just didn't come back."