Edita Krystýnková

"My mother, because she didn't know what was going to happen and how things were going to turn out, tried to do some work. And she worked mostly with people who had returned from the concentration camp. She helped them put their homes back together. Then, she started working at the Třinec Ironworks. There was a house called Kovalikovka, and there was a pub there, and she got a job in that pub. That was a way out of our poverty. We didn't have to wander from house to house anymore, and we could stay there. I was very grateful to be with my mother because as she was tapping the beer, I was sitting under the counter, playing, and at least I could see my mother's feet. It was so interesting. Nobody wanted us, but there was a lady who lived upstairs who had lost her husband, who had been killed. Two of her girls died of disease, and her son was taken to the gulag. She was also a Jewish lady. She somehow held on, and when she saw me in that pub, she said, 'No, I'll take you in.' So, for me, that moment is incredible. You don't get help from people who have money. You get help from people who experienced something."

"I remember that we used to go to the forest near Goleszów because there were a lot of raspberries there. We were eating anything we could, so we were picking the berries, and my grandmother would always say to us when something was happening there, "It's the soldiers..." I just didn't know there was a camp there until the last moment. The camp was so heavily guarded that practically nobody escaped from there. Only the closest who were also helping knew what was going on there. Because amongst the guards and so on, there were people who went there because they also wanted to help. It's just that war is not that clear-cut that just somebody is going to kill others. Someone goes to help even to hell like Goleszów."