Kitty Galdová

"I was there when everyone was crying, hugging, and the furniture was being loaded. And that's how they got into Ivančice. Forty-eight died there, and my grandfather died there, too. He's in the cemetery. They've decorated it nicely. Their name was Grossmann. And you can tell his name was Herman Grossmann. And there are addresses, and it says everywhere what they died of. And then I got here when grandma said she didn't sleep all night, that she was leaving. And that she thought Albert, that was my daddy, that he was coming to say goodbye. That a few people visited, but there's nothing more to be done, it says so – it’s hard to see now. And that's there, it's in German, I'll translate it for you. That she's hugging us and that she's leaving the next day. And then they ended up in Terezin. And there were [relatives] from Vienna in Terezin."

"Well, that's how life went, and, I've got confirmation here, I went to fourth grade, fifth grade. And I got a call from the headmaster, and the headmaster was this short gentleman, wearing a blue-grey uniform with a sort-of bayonet. And he said he was informing me that I had to leave the school because I was from a mixed marriage. 'Unfortunately, it's not the children's fault for the parents.' But they got an order that I have to leave school. Because mom is Jewish. And my brother, yes, we both had to leave school. And now I came home, and now there was this teacher, Appel was his name. That's how I remember it. That was fourth grade, so take it, I was 12 years old. And he says, 'I'll sort you out...' And he was a “pflichťák”. Did you hear about “pflichter“? When they had to go on duty. Either someone went to the cattle in the country. Or in a household, a housewife. And he said to me, 'I'll sort you out at Bornemann's.' And Bornemann was the biggest kingpin in Znojmo. And I came home and our mom said, 'Um Gottes Will, so schrecklich, Bornemann?' We'd be in a concentration camp right away. Our father actually saved our lives because he was German."

"But we lived down there, in the basement. And all of a sudden... and now it's being bombed. And all of a sudden, they moved into Mrs. Mach's apartment, some room, the SS. And now they came into the basement and said, 'Mrs. Senger, the SS moved in.' And no one said we were Jewish. And now it's been 45 years. And all of a sudden someone comes in, we live in that basement, and suddenly someone comes up and says, 'Mrs. Senger, they're loading bags, SS, and they're in such a hurry.' That means it was already known that the Russians were close. And our mother says, 'Have they left? And we're going home!'"

"And then we went back to the Kolonka. We lived on the ground floor and suddenly a car, behind the car many Russians. And by then I was already fourteen and fifteen. Our mother says, 'Yes, but here on the street? We'll have them in the house any minute.' And you know how it goes. So I had to go to sleep on the first floor, to some other people’s place, where the windows were faced the backyard. There was s street called Polská. And there lived this young mother with a child. Six Russians raped her. That's how I remember it. There were houses like this on Pražská, where the German army was accommodated. And then, after the war, they chased all those Germans who went to what they call this Todesmarsch here in Brno, the displacement. And now they've got a gun, a rifle, people, Czechs, and now they're taking revenge. And just, his name was Winter, that's what they said, he was transporting coal to people. He got it, when the militia was with us, something like that, he got it, they gave him a gun. And now he was on a rampage in that camp. And it was from the vicar’s wife, it was a German woman, they cut her hair and put her head in the toilet, and all that happened."