Jitka Helanová

"I know that my mother would often be in this strange mood and she would take me for a walk on the Libeň bridge and look down into the water. Later she told me that she was contemplating whether to take me, to jump or not to jump, that those were desperate times. Look, now I’m all shaken. It was simply terrible, but above all: I was the one who was never allowed to say anything. It's just that my mom was still scared and she kept taking it out on me. So I was constantly under mental strain, both due to my father's death and due to the fact that my mother was always afraid of something, which she took out on me."

"I'll tell you one more interesting thing: in our house the tenants changed often, because of the relatively high rent. One time, around 1945, two young people moved in there for a short time, a Jewish family from England that wanted to continue their travels to Australia. They were taking a kind of break here in Prague. It was a Jewish family, very lovely people. And the lady saw that my mom, despite our living conditions, was always elegantly dressed. She still wore clothes that she had bought with my dad. And the lady asked my mother if she would sew something for her. And she did. So my mother sewed and Mrs. Borská gave her nylons in return. Money too, apparently, but the stockings! if you could only see what trouble those stockings caused! The stories some people created about what kind of people my mother must know to wear stockings like that! I just want to underline how terribly mean people are even just because of these little details. Well, Mrs. Borská offered my mom that, as she and her husband were going to Australia, my mom and I could join them if we wanted to. Apparently they had enough money to help my mom set up a fashion salon there. Because there were no custom-tailoring services in Australia, there were only ready-to-wear clothes everywhere. They saw that my mom had good taste and that she could use this in some way. So, they wanted to invest in her and wanted us to go with them. Which my mom didn't do. Well, they were great people, they still wrote to us for years. They were really lovely.”

"I know that I was wondering around the house and then, I don't know why I went upstairs, where the bedroom was. I just did. Well, after a while, two or three guys came up there. I think there were three. They just sconfidently came into the bedroom. I probably even said hello, but no one noticed, as they started to open all the cupboards. I saw with my own eyes how they took things for themselves. I know grandma had some special curtains there. They were these embroidered silk or transparent curtains - absolutely beautiful. And it was there that my grandmother probably had somethings for me. Some bedding. And they took it all.”