Ing. Felix Winkler

“While my parents still lived in Czechoslovakia, in Miroslav, I wanted to come to visit them from London. During fourteen, four-teen long years I have not been granted a visa to visit my parents. When I asked why, they replied: Prague didn’t give permission. (So you only went in 1963?) I don’t remember the dates precisely. (It would correspond to 1963 or 1964.) It got better only after Dubček came to power.”

“(What languages were spoken in your home?) Before 1938 it was German, and after 1945 Czech. People here in England now talk about the First World War. My father was a soldier under the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He served in the Austrian army and he attended German schools. My generation attended Czech schools. (…) I attended Germans schools fr the first five years, and later Czech schools. I speak both these languages well, although I am forgetting Czech. If I lived in Prague for two weeks or a month, I would get into it again. I don’t have an opportunity to speak Czech.”

“At that time we didn’t know whether the train would go from Terezín to Switzerland or to Auschwitz. Only when we arrived at the Swiss border, we saw: This is Switzerland. We were free, we did not fear whether the transport would go to Auschwitz. We had a place to stay there, we had food. We had the essentials. Everybody wished for the end of the war in order to be able to return home. My parents thought that their store and the sawmill would be returned to them. There was nothing, no machines. Everything had been stolen. The plot was all that was left.”

“Mein Heim ist nicht meine Heimat, meine Heimat ist nicht mein Heim. My home is not my homeland and my homeland is not my home. What does homeland mean? Before 1938 it was Miroslav, it was my homeland, my home, where I belonged. (…) Morava is the land, which gave birth to noble race, the Czech land, my home.”