Alfred Ševčík

"That surprised me at the time. My mother had been through so much, and despite that, when [after the war] the German lady who used to own the flat came asking, as she had nowhere to sleep until the transport arrived, my mother said: 'Don't worry, you can stay with us.' The Czechs told her off at the time: 'You're a Jew, you were in a concentration camp, and you're letting a German stay with you!' "

"My mother received a summons to the Jewish community; there they gave her a piece of cloth with Jewish stars printed on it, Stars of David, yellow with the 'Jude' inscription in the centre. So I cut them out for her. A child doesn't understand things like that, I just had it as a toy. Mother smoothed the edges and stitched them to our coats. But when mother went out, as she had a lot of acquaintances and she didn't want them to see her wear the star, she would cover it up with her handbag. But the Nazis found out about that soon enough and forbade, women especially, from covering up the star in such a way."

"And another time, there was this one brass hat, with a servant, and he didn't want to be with the rest, he wanted to lodge somewhere else. We took him to a flat, to that friend's place. And now the women were all gone, so my mother stayed to sleep there with her feet to the door, the servant slept on the cupboard. And they stole a piano from somewhere, he was quite clever I guess, the Russian, and they dragged it into the flat and played on the piano."

"But then the whatever uprising broke out in Slovakia, and as the Valaš region was close by, close to the Slovak border, Germans moved into the mountains, a lot of them. So they said: 'You can't stay here!' I didn't go to school of course. They had an estate, they called it a farm, and it was quite far away, or at least it seemed like that, far from Zašová, right by the forest. And when I arrived there, there were four Roma children already hiding out there. I still remember their names - the little girl Vanda, little Raimond, and then Alfred, the same name as me, so to tell us apart they called him Olik, then me, and last was Lojza Adam. I met up with them in Ostrava later on, after the war. Those were Czech Gipsies, very few of those were saved."