Marie Neumannová

"Well, then, I remember she said so even afterwards, that she always looked for a handsome officer in the compartment. There were quite a lot of them going around. To get something transferred, she'd sit in that compartment and she'd just make it so he'd ask her a question or something. So then they'd get to talking, she knew German perfectly well because she used to go to Vienna to see her aunt, her grandmother's sister. She used to clean for a Jewish family there. There were a lot of Czechs in Vienna. And artisans and cleaners and nannies of all kinds. So my mother used to go there for holidays, so she learned German, or Vienna German directly. So when she was traveling to Vienna—or rather from Vienna—she sat in a compartment with an officer so that she could smuggle some things, a bag of some sort. She took me by the hand, carrying a small bag, and her gentleman companion took the larger one. And they weren’t searched. They just walked through like that. Then they parted ways, and that was it."

"My father got a very decent apartment, a three-room apartment with a bathroom, hot water, a boiler, two balconies on the first floor. And it was number six Úprková street. The road and immediately the pavement and immediately the garden opposite our windows and balconies. And there were three villas, you could say houses, which were occupied by the Germans, and there was the Hitler Youth. Under fifteen, the smaller ones, they only had wooden knifes, like this at their waist, but the bigger ones could shoot. Because my mother was a true Sokol member in Hodonin. But when the Germans came, they took some things for safekeeping. She took skittles and a ball. The ball was leather, with a tube inside. And we as kids wanted to take it, but my mother wouldn't let us, because it wasn't ours. Well, we took it once. You had to inflate the ball first, stick it in the leather. And it laced up like a shoe, the ball. We had a needle for that, too, so that the leather, the lace so to speak, wouldn't break, so it was stitched. And there were lawns in Hodonin, I'll show you that later, which the Germans ordered that nobody could enter, especially not the Czech trail, in front of those tenements, beautiful. Well, we kids were playing and the ball fell there. So it was our ball, I took it, we were afraid, but in the end I took it, but I don't even know what happened. I picked up the ball, we heard a thud, blood was flowing and someone shot me in the leg. It was a boy from the Hitler Youth, I don't know which one, how. I had a hole here, outside the bone and outside the veins, here. It was kind of artificial, artificial skin. And my grandfather took the first... I came home, I was bleeding, I didn't feel it. And there was a tiny, tiny bullet. So my grandfather quickly took the stroller, as we lived in a tenement house, there were little children, he didn't even say who it belonged to, the stroller, he put me in it and quickly to Dr. Revere. He was a Jew, and the Gestapo, or simply the Germans let him still work there, because they needed a doctor. Like their people had to go to the military service, so they had to... And I know that he was very highly praised there, especially by the Czechs, and they were happy that he stayed there, But just before the end of the liberation, they took him away and probably transported him to Auschwitz or some other concentration camp that was still operating."