Jarmila Patočková

“I worked in the Health Insurance Company. We always locked the door, and so they rang the door bell and I went to the open the door. There were two men in leather coats standing there and they said in German that they were looking for Mr. Tesař. I replied that he was not there, but that he was upstairs, and they went there. But I noticed the leather coats, their German speaking and the fact that they were looking for Mr. Tesař and I realized that he must have been involved in something. I thus rushed to my desk and picked up the phone and called him: ‘Mr. Tesař, there are two men looking for you, they wear leather coats and they speak German.’ He put down the phone and said that in the moment I told him, he had removed the keys from his pocket so that he would not have them with him, and they already rushed into the office and we saw them leading him away. They arrested him, but he came back after the war.”

“The school in Mukachevo was new, it was built recently. The first grade was full of pupils, but the higher the grade, the fewer children there were, because the people who moved to Mukachevo were young and therefore they had small children. Only gradually the number of children began to grow. (Only Czech children were going to this school?) Only Czech children. (The Rusyn children, for example, were not allowed to go there?) Why would they want to go there? The Rusyn children would not be able to understand Czech. But there were three or four Jewish children in our class. They told us that their parents had shops in the city and that they were sending them to this Czech school. The Jews had their own schools there, but they wanted their children to learn Czech well, because they saw the Czechs as their prospective customers. I remember that when we had classes on Saturdays, these Jewish children would just sit like that the whole morning, because they were forbidden to do anything on Saturdays. The parents sent them to school in order to avoid troubles, and the children thus went there, but they didn’t do anything at all.”