Evelina Merová

„I remember very well performing the piece ‘About Ctirad and Šárka‘. I don’t remember who wrote the script but I know that it was a huge success. It was even written in rhymes, like poems. I portrayed Šárka who was tied to a pillar. And then there was Ctirad. We played it over and over again several times. Probably only kids from the children’s block watched it because nobody else came. There was also a choir singing ‘Domine Deus‘ in Latin. The SS men came to listen and asked Fredy what they were singing. Fredy spoke German with them as he knew German better than Czech, which he did not command too well, in fact. And he said that they were singing: ‘God, bring us bread and peace.’ One of the SS men replied: ‘But they already have that.’ And Fredy said: ‘This is why they’re singing the song.’”

“Jews were not allowed to own pets. I had a little bird, a canary. And I was told to give it away as well. Back then, I was ten years old. I remember vividly walking with the cage through Prague. In Haštalská street, I handed it over to a man who was interested in it. Thus we did not give it away to Gestapo as we were supposed to. But I just could not understand why the bird is a Jew or why this yellow bird who used to sing so nicely should be any kind of a threat to the Third Reich.”

“It was in 1953. I was already studying at university by then and the situation was very serious, indeed. My adoptive father, who was a doctor, was terrified because for a while it really seemed that they would send all the Jews from the Soviet Union to exile somewhere in Birobidzhan, which is a province in the Far East bordering on China. It was presented as a measure to protect the Jews from an outraged nation keen on avenging the killings of outstanding personalities of Communist life that were allegedly committed by Jews. But in reality, the Jewish connection was made up, pure propaganda. Fortunately, Stalin managed to die just in time in March 1953 and his death ended this terrible hysteria. But at that point, we sincerely believed that Stalin didn’t have anything to do with it… we thought that others at other places were responsible for heating things up and that Stalin was just kept in the dark by others.”

“The Germans fled and we stayed in the camp on our own. There was me, two girls of my age with their mothers and a couple of Lithuanians and Hungarians. Those who had more vitality were digging up potatoes and baked them in a stove; some of them went to a nearby Polish village to beg for food. The villagers gave them bread and some were even invited to come to the kitchen and have a meal with them. But I couldn’t walk so I just stayed in my bed on the block all the time, eating what I was given or nothing at all. I guess on January 21, the door to our block opened and a young man in a Soviet uniform stepped in. He greeted us in Russian: ‘Zdrávstvujtě’. We had no idea who he was but we figured that we were free.”

“Jews were obliged to wear a yellow Star of David. This was compulsory since 1941. The star had to be firmly attached to your clothes and if you wore a coat, it had to be on it as well, so you had to wear two stars. What was kind of striking for me was that if you needed more than one star, you had to buy it, i think you could get them at the Jewish community. So people who wore more than one set of clothes would buy several stars.”

“I really wanted to study Slavic studies because I still hoped that one day I would come back to Prague. But that was in the 1950s when the universities didn’t accept Jews, in particular not to this kind of faculties. They told me that they’re looking for future employees of diplomatic missions and that Jews were not trustworthy for that kind of jobs. So I wasn’t accepted to the faculty where I wanted to study. I even wrote a letter to Stalin because I thought that it had to be a mistake. You know, I was a very good student with excellent marks so I couldn’t believe that I had not passed. I thought that somebody must have made a mistake there. I even got a reply in writing from Stalin’s office about half a year later. It said that on that year there was a huge surplus of students who wanted to study at that faculty and that they simply couldn’t take everybody.”

“We were in Moscow and we had neither a ticket, nor a permit. But then it turned out that by chance there was a cargo train leaving Moscow for which you didn’t need ticket or permit. So I boarded that train with the family – I don’t remember anymore what their name was – and we travelled for 24 hours from Moscow to Leningrad. I managed to send a telegram but it never arrived. So nobody was waiting for me. I got off that train on August 31, 1945. It was a rainy day, the weather was weird, and I thought to myself: ‘what am I doing here?’ But the kind gentleman accompanied me to the address I had and the people living there were very surprised by my arrival. They hadn’t been informed about it since my message didn’t come through. I told them I was from Syzran and I have to say, they welcomed me very warmly. But of course, they had a lot of their own trouble as well.”

“I had no boots and was left in the camp while everybody who was capable of working had to go to work. When they left, the guards lined us up and told us they would take us back to the camp, which meant that we were going to be sent to the gas chambers. That was in the end of November, it was on the 28th or the 29th. There was a lot of snow and it was terribly cold. We walked for hours and hours, it seemed endless indeed. We marched to the railway station but when we got there, it turned out that there was no railway station anymore. It had been bombed by the Soviets and was all in ruins. It was also apparent that the Red Army was very close as we could already hear the thundering gunfire from the frontlines. So they ordered us to turn around and walk back to the camp. The way back took hours again. When we arrived in the camp, the other inmates were completely surprised to see us alive. Everybody assumed we had already been gassed. But it didn’t work out for the Germans again. The problem was that as I had to walk barefoot in the snow, my feet were badly frost bitten. They were all black and covered with pus.”