Lída Tarmesar

“We were in many cities and we ended up in a small town. They found a huge house for our family which consisted of my father, my mother and six children. This house belonged to a 90-year-old woman and her 70-year-old daughter. It had something like four or five rooms. They didn’t ask them to accommodate us in the house, they simply ordered it. They didn’t ask there. It was a dictatorship, a terrible dictatorship. When Stalin ordered something, it had to be done and the people were scared. If someone didn’t agree, he could have been exiled to Siberia. The people in whose house we lived didn’t like it but there was nothing they could do about it.”

“Papa said we’ll go far, far away so that we won’t see any Germans and war again. So we did and went as far as Tashkent and there we lived in a Kolkhoz because my father thought it was better for us to dwell in the countryside then in the cities as small children weren’t able to work and we didn’t have any occupation or qualification. We worked outside on the field harvesting potatoes so we could take some potatoes and sometimes even tomatoes home. So in Tashkent we had enough food and we were waiting for the war to come to an end.”

“There was a German family in our village. I went to school with the kids from that family. When the Germans invaded Poland he was put in charge of the village because he was German. So now he was running the whole village on his own. He gave the order that each Jewish family would be given a wagon and two horses and would be required to go into exile to the USSR. He told us to go to the Russian border and that the Russians would take care of us. We were, of course, angry at him for having to leave our house and leave almost all of our possessions behind. At this time, we didn’t know about the concentration camps yet. Neither did we know about the mass murders and executions of Jews that were about to come. So we thought that he was actually doing us harm. Only afterwards did we learn that he had known what was going to come. He was actually helping us.”

“On our way to lunch we encountered a soldier. My younger sister thought he was Polish. But I said that he didn’t have an eagle but a lion, so he couldn’t be Polish but he should be Czech. We came up to him and started to chat in Russian with him. After just a few minutes he said: “Aren’t you girls Jewish?” I said: “So it is”. He told us that his family is Jewish as well. He said that he’ll find us a place where we could wash ourselves and sleep and that the next day he’ll take us to the general staff. He told us not to speak and said that he’ll take care of everything. He testified that he was our relative and signed that testimony. They then sent us with two Czech soldiers into the city to buy uniforms – we got so much clothing that it was almost too much to carry it back.”