“I got to know my husband only here in Kadaň. He was in a concentration camp and I was in Germany. And here in Kadaň we met. I was only seventeen years old. And he protected me. He said: ‚Look, let my girlfriend alone, she did nothing bad to you, I was in a concentration camp.‘ And they still said: ‚So you married a German woman?‘“
“We had a cellar made in case they´d hit us. So they made a single cellar from three. It was done so that the ceilings would not break down. So when the bombs hit us, the house was already on fire, all was destroyed and we could not get out. Those were the blocks connected by those concrete pipes. So we got out using the house next to us. And when we got out, everything was on fire and crushing down. The windows were breaking due to the heat. And they were still throwing bombs down, that got stuck in the ground and exploded only later.”
Erika Weissová, née Šustrová, was born on August 22, 1930 in Saská Kamenice. She came from a mixed marriage, her father was Czech and her mother German. Together with her parents, sister and a brother she grew up in a large industrial town of Saská Kamenice (Chemnitz in German). Following a large bombing in spring 1945 her family was forced to flee to Kadaň to their relatives. In 1947 she met her future husband Chajeme Weiss. Nine years older Chajem came from Carpathian Ruthenia and during was in a concentration camp. After returning to Kadaň he met Erika, who could only speak German. At the time Ms. Erika didnt work, but cared for her ill mother, who undergone a stomach operation still in Germany (probably in December 1944). Her sister was a seamstress and her brother worked in Germany as a car mechanic. At the age of eighteen the witness got pregnant and had to get married. Together with her husband she raised three children. She had 7 grandchildren and 12 great-grandchildren. In 1994 Czech Union of Freedom Fighters in Kadan awarded Mrs. Erika Weiss a badge of honour for meritorious functionary activity in the Czech Union of Antifascist Fighters. The witness died in June 2016.
