Angelina Čmolová

“[Q: Do you have any specific memory from the transport? Did part with your family in some very emotional way? You were eight years old?] Not even that, seven and a half. [Q: What did they tell you?] I don’t remember that, but I’m sure they told both our parents and us that we would come back soon. That they wanted us to be safe, and I have terrible memories of that journey. After three or four days... there was some food in the little bundle we had with us, but I remember there were some partisans with us, they were even hungrier than we were, so even the little we had, they... we didn’t give it to them, they took it. I guess they were hungrier than us, or they thought that we would get some food soon whereas they wouldn’t. And it was awful for us also because I got a double middle ear infection, and all that I remember from the journey was how we hid and how I kept crying and crying and crying. And we mostly travelled in the night, so we wouldn’t be seen, because they used bombs, the royal army, if it was them, it might have been the British, who came to their help. So I don’t know who bombed us, but someone did, and I remember we only travelled in the dark. [Q: You stayed hidden in the day?] We were hidden somewhere or slept somewhere in the day. The journey was terrible because I fell ill. [Q: Didn’t you have penicilin?] We didn’t have penicilin, we didn’t have a doctor, my eardrums ruptured. Even today, one of them is scarred and the other is ruptured.”

“My worst memory, I’d say, was that bullying. [Q: Who bullied whom?] The children. There was a daughter of one of the carers, already in Nové Hrady, a Greek carer. And I don’t know why we wanted to get our revenge on her, I was there, I didn’t stop it. I didn’t do anything, I just watched how two girls held her by her legs and arms and pretended they’d throw her out of the window. They wouldn’t have done it, but for that five-, six-, seven-year old child, or how old she was, it must have been a shock... And like that in this way. [Q: And was there any bullying of the children by the carers?] There was. I remember there was a girl there who would wet herself She was the same age as us. Ten, eleven, twelve perhaps. She was certainly ill. I don’t know where the carer found it in her, such anger and hatred to that little thing, she was really just a child still. I don’t know how she did it, she [the carer] couldn’t force us to mock her. But she made it so that the girl had to... that we mocked her; I don’t know if I did as well. But the girl must have suffered terribly. I have dreadful memories of that. [Q: And the carer incited you to do it?] Yeah, that too, when she swore at her.”