Věra Jílková

“Fredy Hirsch thought he would save the children. That didn’t work out. And when he saw that he wouldn’t be successful, he got very nervous. So he requested, I think, it’s said, an hour to consider things, because all the adults expected that... The war was still far from end... He tried to form some group of people who would protest somehow, who would defend themselves even, because when the last transport was there, in the camp, we expected that we would also be told that we would go somewhere and that we too would die in the end. Everyone thought that the person who’d lead some kind of resistance would be Fredy Hirsch. And when he saw that he wasn’t having any success, because he could see that already, he asked for an hour to consider things. Whether he’d take it, or whether he wouldn’t. When he saw it wasn’t going to work, then what he did - he ate the pills. So he didn’t save the children, all the children died. Unless something extraordinary happened, all the children died.”

“What was it like? When we came to Hronov, we had a free ride because we didn’t have any money. It was a Sunday, because of the market. We went to the house, Máňa wasn’t there, but her husband was there, and he said that Máňa was at the cinema. I don’t know how he did it, but a moment later the city loudspeakers were requesting Mrs Zilvarová to return, that the Holzner girls had come back. Máňa came running, it was amazing, they had two rooms, they cleared out one room for us, Máňa made our beds, they gave us their own ones, we took it all. Máňa baked us cakes and cooked for us, a plateful of cakes, we lay on the beds, and we either slept, or gorged ourselves with cakes.”