Eva Štixová

“I was born on May 13, 1941 in Pilsen in the family of a shop assistant. My mom and I went to the concentration camp on January 26, 1941 – no, it was 1942. We followed our daddy, who had not been sent there in a transport but who had been arrested because he and his friends had given some financial support to children of communists who were imprisoned. The person who was collecting the money made a list of donors, and the Gestapo came for him and although he hanged himself in the toilet, the Gestapo got hold of the list and arrested all whose names were there. They arrested all these people and sent them to the concentration camp even before the transports were dispatched. My dad was there together with the other people for some time and then they transported him to Mauthausen and we have never seen him again.”

“I don’t know what to say. I think that people who have been through concentration camps as well as the children who had been in hiding did not have an easy life. It is something that remains deep inside the person. I have a friend in Israel. He is a Czech originally from Horažďovice who had been kept in hiding in the basement for the entire war. Christians were hiding him and they were not scared. I think that our people do not have to live in fear anymore, that hopefully nothing as horrible as what had happened would not happen ever again.”

“After the revolution (probably meaning the invasion of the Soviet army in 1968 – ed.’s note) there was a problem when a new manager came there. He worked there for some time and then he got the idea that he would make me his deputy. But I was not in the Party, and he therefore had to go with me to the regional committee of the communist party where they summoned us. The committee explained to him that – in the first place, because I was Jewish, and secondly, because I was a non-Partisan – there was no way I could be promoted to such a high position. The manager said, fine, if she cannot do the job, I will not do it either. They thus eventually approved it. But I had to go to the Party’s regional committee every three months and give accounts about how I was managing the employees and so on. But I managed to live through it, because I had no problems in my work. I kept working in Tuzex until the company’s end. When the company went out of business, I remained faithful to my original trade and I started a shop with cosmetics, ceramics and tobacco, and I still continue to run it.”