“Mom came to my grandpa’s cousin, she was not Jewish and she had no children, and they agreed that this woman would take me into her family after I was born. Mom was thus preparing herself for having to put me away. This was a very bad period which has affected her relationship to me for my entire life, basically, because she also had to instill this feeling in her mind that I would have to go away. And it was always perceptible that she treated me differently than my other siblings, and I could sense it strongly already as a child, but I never spoke about it. Only once I reproached her for that when I was some six years old, but now I know that it was not her fault. She had to cope with it in some way, knowing that I would be born and then be no more. What happened then was that she wrote Dad about it; post service worked from time to time. Dad sent her a message that he absolutely didn’t want me to leave the family, writing that he would certainly come back and that he opposed the idea that she should put me away.”
“Speaking of my father’s departure, an interesting thing happened. When they were leaving, they were told they were going to work. Mom therefore gave Dad at least some food ration stamps. But a few days after they had been assembled, they could see that they would be leaving Prague in cattle-trucks, and Dad knew what it meant, and he thus thought: ´What would I do with the food stamps now?´ We needed them, and when he was boarding that cattle-truck, he thus folded the ration book to look like an envelope, and he wrote on it: ´Please, deliver it to this address...´ and he wrote our address there. When the train was passing through a forest somewhere near Prague, there was a group of people standing there, and Dad squeezed this letter through a crack between the planks and it flew away. Now imagine that one day Mom went to the door and somebody had put these food stamps into our mailbox, without even ringing the bell or saying anything so that we could thank him or her. The person must have been quite brave, considering the circumstances. He or she didn’t know what might happen – there had been shooting in our street before, and besides, everybody was in need of food stamps. This person had to travel to Prague, find the house and see what would happen, and then go back. This was one of the things that enabled us to keep our heads above water.”
“There is a large group of people who think very negatively of children who had been hidden, this thing is very painful. I learnt that people who have survived the holocaust in a concentration camp or in any other way cannot – and don’t want to – imagine how it affected the children who had not been in a concentration camp, but who had been hidden away. This problem of mine with my mom – and I didn’t remember anything from that time, it was just what I felt – her different attitude toward me… I know that it was very painful for her, but it was simply impossible to get over it anymore. She was cuddling my brothers, but not me. When you are experiencing it since your childhood, you begin to regard it as normal, because you live like that, but you can never cope with it. Thank God our psychologists who deal with this, like Helena Klímová, already recognize it, at least partially, but many people from the Jewish community – and many of them are smart people, who have survived nasty, terrible things, Auschwitz and all that, they simply cannot understand this at all. They cannot and they don’t want to, either, when this topic is brought up. They are relatives of my husband’s. My husband was not in hiding as a child, he was born after the war, but his father and his family had been in Auschwitz – and there is contempt, it’s so terrible, but I really don’t know how this could get solved.”
Ivana Kovanicová was born in December 1944. Her father was of Jewish origin and even before the birth of his daughter he was taken by Germans to a concentration camp in Prague-Hagibor. He worked as a maintenance worker there. Her mother, who was not Jewish, thus faced a desperate situation. She was left without any means and she feared that she and her children would be sent to a transport as well. With a nine-year-old son and in advanced pregnancy she eventually found help in her native village of Modlíkov in the Highlands, where the Moravec family provided her with shelter in their modest house. Ivana Kovanicová has thus been living in hiding since she was born, without any regular medical checkups, which has had negative influence on her health. The entire family got reunited after the war. They returned to Prague, where Ivana began attending school in 1951. After the war the family was travelling to Modlíkov every summer and the father was helping local people there (setting up electricity connections in their houses for free, etc.) in order to show his gratitude for the help that they have provided to his wife and children.
