“Dad said one day: ‘I’m off to Terezín, I want to see my daughter.’ So he took a rucksack, Mum packed his things, cigarettes, and he came all the way to the gate, which was guarded by Czech gendarmes. The commanders were German, but the guards were Czech gendarmes. The guard sees him: ‘For God’s sake, what are you doing here?’ But there were also some - we called them lady birds. German women who, say, when we were working in the fields, checked us to see that we weren’t smuggling anything, cucumbers, for instance. And these lady birds took his rucksack, opened it, broke everything to pieces to see if there was something inside, and they asked: ‘What have you got those cigarettes for?’ And Dad, he was like a child: ‘Well, because I’m used to giving cigarettes to someone when he does something for me.’ The guard said: ‘Please...’ And Dad told him my name, that I’m in Terezín. The guard says: ‘Please, sir, pack your things and get out of here quick, so they don’t lock you up.’ Dad went back home in dismay, rucksack and all, and I received an indirect greeting via one of the guards, that Dad had been there.”
“There was a train somewhere from the direction of Pilsen, it was taking people who had been assigned to work in the Protectorate, somewhere around Pilsen, there were factories there. And they had a train dispatched by the American army. They had food, they were well supplied. And we wanted to get on to the train. There was even one acquaintance of ours from Frýdek, we knew him. But they didn’t want to let us in. There was a young Russian soldier standing there, he saw it all. He went up to the train, opened the door, and chucked us in. That’s a kind of positive thing about the Russians.”
“I was alone. The next day we received a summons to a transport east. Me too. I was fourteen and a half, and I went all by myself. I was walking along, I had the ticket, and I met - to this day I don’t know who it was, what her name was, nothing - I met a woman around thirty to thirty-five, I don’t know, I’m bad at estimates. And because I had a huge need to speak with someone, she looked at me and I told her the lot, that Dad wasn’t a Jew, that I was alone here, that I had the ticket. She said: ‘Listen, go to the council of elders in Terezín.’ There was a council of elders there that put together the transports. The Germans just gave them a number and told them to work it out. I went there. And they pulled me out of the transport. That lady was my guardian angel. I would love to know who she was. But I’ll never found that out any more.”
Eva Heferová was born in 1928 into the Měkyn family in Třinec. Her father Jan was a manual labourer, her mother Růžena came from a Jewish family of general goods traders. Eva’s father refused to divorce when the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia was declared, and so he ended up in a labour camp. The rest of the family was gradually deported to the Terezín ghetto, the witness was the first to go, in 1942. In the end, both her parents, her sister, and her brother survived the war, but a number of their relatives did not. Initially, Eva was partial to the ideas of communism. However, when she discovered that the Communists were promoting anti-Semitic ideas, she joined the Haganah, an organisation that searched for young Jews in post-war Europe, provided them with military training and prepared them for their departure to Israel. Eva Heferová immigrated there in 1949, together with her husband, whom she had met in Terezín. Then she divorced and married again. She ended up permanently settling down in Israel; she lived in a kibbutz for twenty-three years.
