Frideta Seidlová

“I remember that. When I met some girl and asked her if she wanted to play with me, the first thing she asked me was whether I was a ‘Dshew’, or a ‘Casolic’. She couldn’t even pronounce words properly, but she already knew that she wasn’t supposed to play with little Jews.”

“We had to get up before sunrise and hurry to the cart. We rode the whole day until nightfall. Someone in the village we reached let us sleep over in the straw, and the next day we continued. It wasn’t just the three of us, but also Mum’s sister with a little baby and her husband, and my father’s brother. They all gathered up at our place when the war began, so that we’d be together. And so we all travelled in that one cart across the whole of Poland right to the borders.”

“One shouldn’t die, shouldn’t give up, one should fight. If he wanted to die, he should’ve fought first. That’s the way I saw it. And even today when they celebrate him and I hear them say he sacrificed himself, I think to myself, why? We still had the normalisation, everything still happened the way it did. I know he was a hero, but he wasn’t the only one. There was one more after him, but he’s not talked about. There were other such people abroad. When it comes it, nowadays it’s a rather common method of protest in the Orient, to burn yourself alive. It’s also connected with giving life a low value.”

“The soldiers came to us in the night. They were two very decent, uniformed young men. They told us very politely that we should pack our things and come with them. They asked us where the men were, we said serving in night jobs. So they sent us to inform them where we’d be waiting for them, so that they could join us after work. That was good news. So the grown-ups set straight off to say the men should join us - that meant my father and the husband from my aunt, who had a baby.”