Lilly Štěpánová

“It was not that they (the kapos) would hurt somebody. They only interned me. It happened when my husband was to board the transport, and from our barracks’ windows we could see the railway station where the transport trains were being dispatched. I wanted to see him one more time, and so I opened the window and I was calling him. The kapos down there heard me and they came up for me and warned me that I was not allowed to do it, and I began fighting them and arguing that they let me be because I wanted to see my husband one more time. They took me and put me in prison. But it was nothing, I spent just about one night there. Then they released me, but I have been there. I knew what it looked like.”

“We did not respond to it (to emigration). We said that as long as the family was together, everything was all right. One brother later decided that he would like to go to Israel, and he applied for it somewhere. The other brother had a girlfriend in England, whom he had dated before. He thus wanted to go to England. He went to the railway station to buy the ticket, and that very day the possibility to emigrate ended. The other brother didn’t get to Israel either, because it all ended by that certain date. We thus stayed together. When the transport began, we decided that we would arrange it so that one young person would go with every family. We still had many relatives. Both my brothers married, and each of them thus went with the family of his wife. First brother went with our parents, and the second brother with the family of his wife. We thought that this way everyone would be taken care of, that they would thus be able to help each other.”