"I know that our letters were mointored in the Czech Republic. - And how do you know, Oli? –How do I know? Well, my mother worked at the center as a nurse, and there came a patient who said, 'Mrs. Sramova, you have a daughter in Iceland. I work in the office where your letters are being read. ‘I don't say more. At that time, please, it was done like this, that our letters were read."
"Then my parents went to Terezín at the request of the radio station, where they released the prisoners, but they called doctors and nurses, because they actually locked the prisoners in quarantine there because of infectious diseases and so on were spreading there. So ours stayed there in Terezín and then they persuaded father to stay and move to Litoměřice. Litoměřice actually became a Czech town again."
"It was not difficult to decide. But when I got married, I knew where I was going. Because I came here first. We married in 1960, at the end of the year, directly on New Year's Eve. And in 1961 I went to Iceland for the first time. Just to visit as a woman married to Hallfreður, just like his wife. My husband studied folklore in Prague and definitely wanted to return to Iceland and of course he took me with him."
Olga Maria Franzdottir, née Šrámová, was born on August 25, 1937 in Jilemnice. During the war she was growing up in Nové Město nad Metují. At the end of the war, the witness’s parents went to Terezín to treat prisoners infected with the typhus epidemic. The family subsequently settled in nearby Litoměřice, where Olga attended primary school. She then studied English and Japanese at Charles University. There she also met her future husband - the Icelander Hallfreður Orna Eiriksson, with whom she moved to Iceland after the wedding. Correspondence with parents in Czechoslovakia was checked, as her mother accidentally learned from one of her patients. She traveled to Iceland with her husband, a folklorist by profession, and then stayed together in Ireland and Canada. Together they translated Václav Havel’s play Largo desolato into Icelandic. Olga Maria Franzdottir passed away on October, the 10th, 2024
