Miroslav Velínský

"I left on my own, it was already planned, and my then wife came to Vienna about three months later under the pretext of persuading me to come back. My sister was a very active Party member, so they allowed my wife to go. I told her to come back and bring back the child so they would both stay with me. That actually happened some three months after I left. It was meant to make the regime think that when I see my baby I will definitely want to come back home."

"I went to school in Pisárky; we lived in a villa in Neumannova Street. That's when I first heard the name 'Jew'. One of the kids told me I was a Jew. I came home and asked my mother. I don't remember the answer I got but my mother avoided it all her life. We didn't even live that way. I knew what Hanukkah, Yom Kippur and Purim was. I was given an explanation for those terms but I have little recollection of it. The distance from Telnice was great. The only thing I remember is that my mother once asked me to go to the cemetery in Miroslav where her grandparents were. We never found grandfather's tombstone; it had probably been removed. I don't know. Telnice reminded her very much of her youth, her siblings, that whole family, and that was pretty much her whole life. We didn't know much, and what we know my sister found out after my mother died."