“He didn’t pay attention to us, children, we were eating. He informed the mothers that we would be living in that house, in that flat, that this would be a kind of orphanage for us and that the bedroom was in the very next room. He also said that mothers would go to Hagibor and will produce windows of mica to be used in tanks. But it was so… Today, when I say it, it was really suspicious, because the room when we had the little tables, there was nothing else, just a barren room with some tables and eight chairs, there were no toys or anything. He said a bedroom was just next door. One of the mothers took the handle and opened the door, very quickly. It was so quick that even her children, I don’t know whether she had one or two, no one shouted, neither mothers nor us, we even didn’t get what happened. She just opened the door and there was this empty room, full of dust, there was nothing in it. She yelled, she was the only one to yell and as the window was open, she just flew through it. It was all very quick.”
“He took out the photo and said: ‘You see, this is my daughter. She died of diptheria.’ I’m not sure whether he said that it was two or three months ago. Now he quite clearly said he did not want to me to die, that I resembled her and that he wants me to return home. My mother translated for me but I think I understood him. The girl was really beautiful, perhaps she was like me, I don’t know. I had in myself something strange, no and no and no, a kind of hardened feeling that no matter what he said I wouldn’t go anywhere. I didn’t think about it, I just repeated: ‘I’m not going, I’m not going, I’m not going anywhere.’ He says if I go if he has all released. This strengthened my huge belief in God, since deep inside I heard ‘Say yes’. So I indeed said ‘yes’ and I didn’t really think about it, just said ‘Yes’. He summoned all to him, tore stars from their clothes, gave them money and talked to mothers. Mothers told them where to go and then he ordered the two from the Jewish Community to take down their stars, put them in their pockets and to go, each on one pavement, to take us in the railway station and wait for us to board trains. That was it.”
“He shouted in German to those two and they immediately rushed downstairs. Then he turned and talked to me in German: ‘Komm zu mir’. He spoke to me. I was terrified. I still had the slap in my mind and I thought he would slap me another time. I was terrified, I got up, but… ‘Mum’. My mother walked with me towards him and he quite clearly asked whether I had somewhere to go. A my mother, since we thought my father was imprisoned somewhere in Germany, said: ‘To Růža’. That I had to go to Růža. He asked who Růža was. Růža was our maid.”
Lea Skácelová was born as Liduška Pilná on June 18, 1933, in Pardubice. Both parents came from Jewish families. Her father, Otakar Pilný, and mother, Jindřiška Grottová, worked as shop managers. Her father had a priest as a friend and managed to obtain a baptism certificate and was not, therefore, registered as a Jew and the marriage was seen as a mixed one. Lea was christened in 1939. She was expelled from school after the first year, then attended illegal classes for two years. Most of the family on her mother’s side was deported to the ghetto in Theresienstadt in December 1942. Her father was arrested by the Gestapo in March 1943. In April 1943 Lea and her mother were summoned to Prague, from where they were likely to be sent to Theresienstadt. By the decision of the German clerk, however, Lea returned to Pardubice. Her mother was shortly interned at Hagibor, but then returned to Pardubice too. From April 1943 Lea hid in several evangelical families around Holice, from spring 1945 to the end of the war at the infection ward of the Pardubice hospital. Her mother hid at home and her father was in the internment camp in Postoloprty. The family met again in May 1945. During the war 37 of their close relatives died. After the war Lea studied at the grammar school and graduated in 1952, from 1953 she studied at the Pedagogical Faculty in Prague. Mrs Lea Skálová was a member of the organisation Hidden Child. She died on April 10, 2023.
