“My name is Elinor Köppelová. However, nobody knows me as Elinor, everybody calls me Lenka. I was born in Česká Lípa, probably by chance because we always lived in Prague. It was probably holiday time because I was born in July.”
“It was a premature labour, it caught your mum on holiday?”
“I don't know if it was their intention. I don't know. I left when I was eleven years old. I can't remember talking about such things.”
“What did your parents say to you? That you would go on holiday to England? That they would follow you?”
“It will probably be the same as what you have heard from others. They said we were going just for a while, that they would follow us as soon as they have received their permit from the Gestapo. We all went there hoping we would meet soon again. So my sister and I remember the situation at the station in different ways. Perhaps I, who was the younger one, saw it in a different way. She was one of the older ones who helped the little ones. I can see our mum pushing her way through to us. Now you don't know any more if you visualise it just as the film 'Všichni moji blízcí' ('All my Loved Ones'). I cannot remember any more when watching the film, whether I said to myself that those were my memories or whether I took them over from the film. You see, seventy years is a long time and it happened seventy years ago. I'm 81 years old now. I can't remember my dad being there, but he must have been there. They all had probably met at our place before we left. I have got a scrap book and it is full. My granddad and my aunt wrote something in it before our departure. My granddad wrote: 'Hey, hey, up to Londonday.' All is dated around 30th May.”
“I don't know who found the accommodation for us. If it was our uncle or if it was thanks to Mr Winton. It is such a lapse of memory that we have, nobody will be able to explain it to us ever again. We stayed at Ms. Lamsdon's place. She was fantastic and I stayed there all the time. She looked after me as if I were her own child. And I am sorry I never learned to address her 'auntie' but I called her Miss Lamsdon all the time. Even if my relationship to her was as the closest person whom I always asked for help. Whenever I needed anything she always comforted me. Those were such things... It was in the country in England, in Ross-on-Wye in Herefordshire. When they bombarded London many children were evacuated from there. It was a beautiful piece of the English country. (...) We didn't understand English very much at the beginning, we communicated with our hands and feet. Children learn fast. The first year we attended a one-year school, a two-year school in the country. The next school year I went to an English High School – a private school where they did not recognize any more that I was not English. Children learn fast.”
“Did English children ask you how came that you were in England?”
“I suppose they accepted us as ordinary children. It was still in the country school, they had no idea where Prague or Czechoslovakia were. My sister and I pulled their legs, we said we lived in caves and I think they even believed us. They never asked, I was a 'little Czech girl' and there were no anti-semitic remarks. I think they wouldn't even get such ideas.”
Lenka Köppelová is one of the saved ‘Winton’s children.’ She was born as Elinor Schneiderová in Česká Lípa in 1928. However, she spent her entire childhood in Prague-Karlín till 1939. She came from an assimilated Czech-Jewish family. She and her sister went to Britain in the children transport at the end of May 1939. Nevertheless, their names are not on any official lists of ‘Winton’s children.’ With her sister they lived in the county of Herefordshire. They were isolated from other Czechoslovakian ‘Winton’s children.’ Her elder sister Margit Rytířová (Schneiderová) served in the British RAF. Elinor attended school in a little town Ross-on-Wye not far from the Welsh border. She graduated in 1946 and returned to Czechoslovakia in the same year. Shortly after her arrival to Prague she got married. Her only son was born in 1949. She worked in Artia, a foreign literature publishing house, from the late 50s till 1985. She met Alice Klímová there - another of ‘Winton’s children.’ Later in the 90s she got to know about the fate of Nicolas Winton because of Alice. She learned about how his fate was interconnected with hers and her elder sister’s and how he gained recognition for saving their lives. Lenka köppelová died in 2016.
