“We led an ordinary peaceful life until the Germans came. Then we had to go to the Gestapo for a permit. These were unpleasant experiences, they treated us in a haughty manner. We had to wait in line, we were not allowed to step on the carpet.” “Your parents went there with you?” “Yes, all of us went, it was somewhere in the Dejvice neighbourhood, in some villa. We waited in line, this got stuck in my child’s memory. There was a railing, and a strip of parquet flooring. And we had to stand on this narrow strip and we were forbidden to step on the carpet. ´Nicht auf den Teppich steigen!´ (...) It was unpleasant. We got the permit, but we were not allowed to say that we were going to Palestine but that we were going to Haiti instead. They added: ´That place will become Germanized.´ They had comments like this. When we were then leaving in October, it was very sad, because we were getting along very well with all the neighbours. As we were walking down the stairs, for we lived on the upper floor, all of them were standing in front of their flats and saying good-bye to us. It was very sad. A taxi was waiting to take us to the Masaryk (Wilson? – auth.´s note) railway station and from there we went to Bratislava.”
“(In Bratislava) we were accommodated in a school. There were Hlinka supporters there, they were not very nice to us. Then we travelled on the Danube River, in an ordinary tourist steamboat. There were many of us, the steerage was cleared for us and we slept on the floor pressed one to another. It was not too comfortable, either. We made a stop in Budapest, but we were not allowed to leave the ship. Then we continued to Yugoslavia, to Novi Sad. Some people gave us blankets and apples there, they were probably also some Jews who felt compassion for us. We changed from the steamboat to an iron tow-boat. We arrived to Sulina in Romania, where the Danube enters the Black Sea. We spent a long time there, about two months. (...) It was in winter, it was freezing, we were in the steerage and the water up there was frozen. There was some heating, and then another ship arrived, a transport, also from Prague.”
“After a month my mom took me with her. My brother and my cousin remained with the family. (...) Me and my mom went to Tel Aviv, to a village behind Yaffa, called Bat Yam, meaning Daughter of the Sea. There was something similar to a kibbutz, but it was set up only for immigrants. It was called chavura. We lived in a community there. Children had their own small house. It was a village which had been abandoned during the unrests with the Arabs. People had left unfinished houses there. Yaffa was an Arab town, it was dangerous there. After the unrests were over, the Jews took the place again. It was possible to live there, we had a communal kitchen, laundry room, we shared money, or actually no money at all. We were receiving food, we had a place to sleep, everything was shared.”
“We worked, for example some people worked in the laundry room, there were duties assigned. Some also worked outside the community, for instance in families. But they were not receiving ready money for it, their pay was being sent to the community which was organizing it. My mom worked in the house of one man whose wife was mentally ill. She did the cleaning, it was not a job she was used to, but she had to adapt. After several weeks he made an offer to her that she might also start taking care of his wife, but this was an extra job, they were not supposed to know about it. The community leadership was not supposed to know about it, because my mom could thus earn a bit more money, to get some extra piasters for us. Yaffa was an Arab quarter, the Arabs were selling oranges cheaper than the Jews. Therefore we had to bring them to the kibbutz – chavura – secretly. From time to time my mom would buy ham for me as a treat. We were going to school, we studied, but we did not understand anything, the language is quite different, they don’t even use the alphabet, but the Hebrew script.”
Lota Bendová (b. Ehrmannová) was born in 1928 in Prague in a fully assimilated family of Jewish origin. Her uncle convinced her parents to leave in October 1939 with their children via the Danube River to Palestine. She attended school in Palestine, then she learnt to become a seamstress. At first they lived in a kibbutz near Tel Aviv, later they moved to Haifa. Her brother joined the army, he fought with the Czechoslovak armoured brigade in Dunkirk. After the war together with her parents she applied for repatriation, they returned to Czechoslovakia in 1946 via Italy in a special repatriation train dispatched from Rome. Shortly after the war she married, she has one daughter, two granddaughters. For thirty-seven years she was working as a nurse - teacher in a day nursery.
