Edith Kroupová

"Mother returned right away in May 1945 on a Russian tank. They fled Terezín because typhus broke out there. They tied a rope from the sheets, roped down the wall and escaped. The Russians helped them and brought them to their homes on a tank. Dad was in the west of Germany, around Hannover. They locked him up in a salt mine there in 1943. He was a hundred meters underground, and he didn't even know what year it was when the Americans freed him. He was emaciated, and they called him Gandhi. They fattened him up in a sanatorium, where he stayed until June. They brought him to Cheb, where they handed him over to the Czechs at the border. He had all the documents about what he had experienced. He had a lot of money from the Americans. When he went to buy tickets at the station, they didn't sell them to him because he spoke German and didn't have a white armband. So he walked to Bílina."

“Our life had completely turned upside down. We were the first in our neighbourhood to have a radio. We put up a pole, and a wire ran from that pole to our apartment. The radio only worked with headphones. When Hitler took office, that was the first thing that affected us and made my father feel terrible–that they took away our radio. Persecution began. I attended a German gymnasium, and in 1942, they expelled me because mixed-raced people (I was half Jewish) were not allowed to study. Overnight, from that class where I had friends, classmates... When the principal announced to me that he had to expel me, I know that I was surprised and that he had tears in his eyes, that he was sorry, apparently, that he had to say goodbye to those students who were not of Aryan origin.”