“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.”
“My name is Felix Winkler and I was born on January 1, 1926 in Miroslav. Miroslav is a small town in southern Moravia, about 50 kilometres south of Brno. My father owned a sawmill and a lumber trading company, and the family had been living there for many generations. What happened in 1938 was a disaster. Miroslav became occupied at the end of September or the beginning of October. Those who were Jews like us had to leave Miroslav overnight. My parents were in Brno and my sister and I were knocking on the door of my uncle’s house. He lived in Valašské Klobouky, which was still a part of Czechoslovak territory at that time. As little children we were standing there by our uncle’s house and begging for a place to sleep and some bread. (…) I was going to school there for the entire year. My parents lost everything. (…) It was an unfortunate time, nobody knew what to do.”
“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.”
“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.”
Felix Winkler was born in 1926 in a Jewish family who lived in Miroslav in southern Moravia. Together with his parents and sister he had to leave the town after the Sudetenland became taken over by Germany in autumn 1938. For more than three years he lived as a refugee in Valašské Kloubouky and in Brno with his relatives. In 1942 the family was ordered to board a transport to Terezín. While in the ghetto, he worked with his father in the construction commando, which partly protected them from being sent to the east. In February 1945 the Winkler family was selected for transport to Switzerland. In July 1945 all four of them returned to Czechoslovakia. After the war he studied at secondary technical school in Brno. In May 1949 he went to Israel with his sister Bedřiška. In 1953 he met his wife-to-be in Israel, who originally came from Germany, and they married. In 1956 he went to study and work in Great Britain, and he remained there when he finished his studies. He worked in the construction business as a civil engineer. He lives in northern London.
