Edeltrude Landová

* 1913  †︎ 2010

  • "I drove alone, after a long time. On the one hand, it had to be negotiated and it was not so easy to decide. I went to that hospital. And it was prescribed what we must bring. They expected us to stay there for a few years. Those salaries wouldn't be enough for a pair of stockings. So we were supposed to take two dozen of stockings and other stuff... They wrote it all to us. We had to have it. Hand-sewn shoes, two dozen of stockings, and I don't know how much laundry. It was all counted up. The hospital was so accurate that I could never imagine it possible in my life. But it was good. Our hospitals cannot be compared to the English one we were in. The city had a population of 500,000 and there were two hospitals. One was private, it was easier, and I worked in the other one. I learned there and it was very strict. And I'm still grateful for it, because she was wonderful."

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    Praha, 24.06.2004

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    duration: 53:48
    media recorded in project Stories of 20th Century
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I fled from Hitler to England, my parents died in a concentration camp

Edeltrude Landová was born on July 5, 1913 in Ostrava to a family with Jewish roots. Her father was an electrician, her mother was mostly a housewife, earning extra money as a seamstress. She had a nine-year-old sister who was born in America when her parents lived there. They did not keep any Jewish religious traditions at home. Her father joined the Social Democrats. German was spoken at home, Edeltrude did not speak Czech as a child. After the establishment of Czechoslovakia, the family moved to Slovakia, because the father received a job offer there. She started the first grade of primary school in Trnava, graduated from a private business school, then worked in a company in administration. Just before the Second World War, she was the only one in the family to travel to England for a study-work stay. She graduated from a three-year medical school in Sheffield and then worked at the Czechoslovak military hospital in London until the end of the war. Before the end of the war, she married a Czechoslovak of Jewish descent in England, who at the end of the war organized the repatriation of Czechoslovak citizens back to their homeland. Her parents died in a concentration camp, and she met her sister after the war. She worked as a nurse, for example in the Bulovka hospital. She has lived at the Sue Ryder Home in recent years. She died on March 25, 2010.