Myra Zelinková

* 1938

  • "And another memory is that one day my mother came in the evening and said, 'We have to go.' I said: 'Where?' - 'We have to go.' And she led me to a blonde woman. I don't know. There were also decent people who hid me. And I took turns with different people, but I don't remember. And my mother was saved so that the director of Baťa's hospital was a devout Christian who saved people, and she was badly operated on, completely useless. My father was... because we were betrayed, of course, people, we know who, we knew it in 1945, but it was no longer possible because they were in the Communist Party, in the state security. And his father was... Mr. Vavrečka, who is Václav Havel's uncle, they put him in Prague at a branch of Bata. And then I didn't see him until after 1945, because he was in a camp in Postoloprty, it was for the people who were from a mixed marriage and refused to get divorced."

  • "I remember it was autumn, I had plaid dresses, the first dresses, I went to play with them, you can't do it, and I played and I came to the room and there was a mother crying in the corner, on the left side was small, fat male in a leather hat, in a leather coat, next to a tall one. I said to her, 'Mom, mom!' I will start crying, as now I can see it in front of my eyes. And I got a crazy slap, I flew all over the room like that, it was a one-man room. So I recovered, flew again, shouted ´Mom! ’ again and got another slap. Then I remember flying around, then I remember my mother crying terribly and comforting me and that everything hurt. I don't know more."

  • "Suddenly I was sitting and astonished, because I have not experienced so many children yet, I was still among the adults. And suddenly the door opened, the headmaster came in with someone else, and they whispered something. Suddenly he said, 'Get up!' So I got up. ´Out! ’And the lady who put me in there again said, ´Myrinka, come on.’ And I found around 1990, her daughter told me that mother was supposed to take me somewhere. She didn't take me there and took me to hers. They had a villa and there I was hidden in a room and I was not allowed to go out at all."

  • "My grandmother told me, 'If you're nice, I won't go to the transport.' Then I remember waking up at home alone, my father working at Bata in Zlín, but traveling a lot. So I was alone, so I realize, and that my mother came, it was cold, and she cried terribly, and I said, 'And where's Grandma?' - 'She went to the transport. She went to Terezín. ‘Well, I just to add, there was an invitation - departure to Auschwitz in a week. And there they went straight from the ramp to the gas. It was seven in ten minutes, the Germans were so precise that they wrote down the date and how many people went and at what time. This was found out after the war, it can be found in your Yad, this is the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem."

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    Poděbrady, 28.03.2019

    (audio)
    duration: 33:14
    media recorded in project The Stories of Our Neigbours
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I also met decent people who hid me

Myra Zelinková at the age of three years
Myra Zelinková at the age of three years
photo: archiv pamětníka

Myra Zelinková was born on June 29, 1938 in Zlín into a mixed Judeo-Christian family. She was baptized at the age of three. The grandmother of the witness, Bedřiška Weiss, was murdered by the Nazis in 1943 in Auschwitz. The witnesses hid strangers at home until the end of the war. Her mother found refuge in a hospital in Zlín - to escape transport, she was falsely treated there. The witness’s father, who refused to divorce his Jewish wife, ended up in a labour camp in Postoloprty. In 1947 she moved with family to Prague. They lived with an uncle who had spent the war in Palestine and eventually emigrated again in 1967. She was forced to study geological engineering, but did not complete her studies. Due to a serious illness that weakened her heart, she moved to Poděbrady for treatment, where she graduated from the age of eleven. She could not study at a humanities college, refused to go to a technical university and started working. After the Velvet Revolution, she worked for the Czechoslovak Legionary Community, the Jewish Community in Prague, The Hidden Child and WIZO - the International Women’s Zionist Organization. He lives in Poděbrady.