Irena Marvanová

“We were learning a bit of mathematics and Czech. There was some professor, and she was very knowledgeable and I think she had travelled a lot, and she was talking about it in a very nice way and she was teaching us geography. It was interesting. We could not write any notes, because the teaching was being done illegally. We were ready to pretend that we were mending something in case the Germans came in. Since it was not possible to write things down, when we were together, we would be repeating what each of us remembered so that we would be able to practice a little bit.”

“At the beginning they (SS men) were not separating families. When somebody contracted some contagious disease, the other family members were ‘reclaimed’ as it was called and they did have to leave (in a transport). Only then, at the end of the war, families were being separated. We avoided that. My father was sick with erysipelas at that time, I remember that his ear reached almost to his shoulder. It was a contagious disease, and we thus did not have to leave. Then my brother had scarlet fever and one more disease, I don’t even remember what it was.”

“Room number 25. There were twenty-four of us girls there. When I went to look there after the war, the owners who lived there let us in. We went to look inside the corridor, and one of the owners just happened to pass by. We had lived in that building in number 25. They even invited us to come inside and have a look. They showed us the room. When we saw it, we didn’t understand how it was possible to cram twenty-four of us in there. We only had personal space on the bunk beds, and our suitcases were stored under them. There was a tiny shelf on the wall, where we kept a toothbrush, soap and a few things. That was all.”

“We were employed in agriculture, and we were going up there to the so-called ramparts where vegetables were grown. We had to dig with a spade because it was not possible to bring any machinery there. We had to use a spade so that some vegetables could be planted there.”