Ilse Weitz

"When we were on the run it rained, and we couldn't go any further. And a Czech man said to us, 'Go on, you must go on,' and my mother said, 'We can't go on. It's raining, and we don't have the strength anymore.' The Czech said, 'If you stop, I'll have to shoot you.' But my mother was quick in reaction and said, 'If you shoot me, shoot the children too, because they can't make it without me.' So we stopped and we hid in a barn. And there we met our grandmother, the other grandmother, she was 80 years old. So we were reunited. Grandma didn't eat anything for three days, my mother gave her what we had left. Then we spent the night in the barn and early in the morning we set off. That was very sad. Our grandma couldn't walk any further, so we had to leave her there. Soldiers with guns were driving us on. It was really terrible. Then they took our grandmother to a camp in Vienna."

"First we were in Pohořelice in a camp, we were there for eight days. Then we met my aunt, my father's sister. She cut her veins. The next day we visited her, but she was dead by then. We were there for eight days and there was an outbreak of dysentery. The Czechs didn't know what to do with us, and they put us on hay wagons and brought us to the border. There they took away from us what we still had, but we had nothing left. We only had clothes on."