Professor Jan Skalla

"I didn't even know the card existed. According to the Nuremberg Laws, I am a first-degree miscegenate, or 50 percent Jewish. Sometime at the end of 1944 or 1945, it began to be said that these mixed-bloods would also go on the transport. If someone was fifteen, they were already going to Terezín. But it was said that these little ones would also go. Dad had even saved bread for me in Terezín, but my mother had arranged with the local policeman that he would give her an hour's notice before bringing her a summons to the transport. And in that case my mother would have picked me up and gone underground. She had an agreement that she would hide in a gamekeeper´s cabin until the end of the war, but I have no memory of that, I only know it from stories."

"Sometime at the end of 1944, my father was transported to Terezín and stayed there because the end of the war was approaching. My dad had the advantage that my mother was a Christian, so he was in the second category of people from mixed marriages who didn't go straight to Auschwitz or Treblinka, where they were mostly murdered. He served as a doctor in Terezín. It was a kind of medicine, my dad said that the most they had there was aspirin, sometimes not even that. As far as possible, they just took care of the sick. By the end of 1945, the Germans were already disintegrating, so transports came there from the east, because the Nazis were trying to cover their tracks. They were taking prisoners further away from the front, so several transports [of people] also arrived in Terezín in very bad condition. Dad said, dead and alive. What was the worst, there was an outbreak of typhus in Terezín. Dad and the doctors there tried to cure it. There was an old Dutch doctor who had experience with typhus, because they didn't know any other way. So he always picked lice out of Dad's clothes when they got off work, because they carry typhus. Because of that, Dad didn't get typhus. After the liberation, the doctors and nurses from Bulovka came there, a very well-known professor was in charge, and Dad could go home, which they allowed him to do because they already had enough staff, and they just didn't know whether he was infected with typhus or not. He came to Světlá nad Sázavou and that's actually my first memory of him. I was two years old, he was in isolation upstairs in a little room. I was strictly forbidden to go up there to see him, so the first thing I did was to go up there to see him. That's when I remember my dad sitting on the bed, skinny, and yelling at me to get out immediately. I burst into tears and someone put me away to safety."