Edita Krystýnková

* 1942

  • "When my mother ran here to Silesia, she said, 'No, the girl has to be with me.' So she and my grandmother agreed, and in '45, when the war ended, my grandmother went to Dziengielów on one side of the border and my mother on the other. Grandma said, 'There's your mom behind that tree.' And I, because of that longing - as a child, I was terribly sad, I have the after-effects of that sadness to this day - I imagined mommy completely like a queen. And my grandmother said, 'You have to fly over these plowed places here, and there's mommy behind that tree.' I remember, like it was a dream, flying to see mommy, and when I saw her, she was a person of gold."

  • "My mother, because she didn't know what was going to happen and how things were going to turn out, tried to do some work. And she worked mostly with people who had returned from the concentration camp. She helped them put their homes back together. Then, she started working at the Třinec Ironworks. There was a house called Kovalikovka, and there was a pub there, and she got a job in that pub. That was a way out of our poverty. We didn't have to wander from house to house anymore, and we could stay there. I was very grateful to be with my mother because as she was tapping the beer, I was sitting under the counter, playing, and at least I could see my mother's feet. It was so interesting. Nobody wanted us, but there was a lady who lived upstairs who had lost her husband, who had been killed. Two of her girls died of disease, and her son was taken to the gulag. She was also a Jewish lady. She somehow held on, and when she saw me in that pub, she said, 'No, I'll take you in.' So, for me, that moment is incredible. You don't get help from people who have money. You get help from people who experienced something."

  • "I remember that we used to go to the forest near Goleszów because there were a lot of raspberries there. We were eating anything we could, so we were picking the berries, and my grandmother would always say to us when something was happening there, "It's the soldiers..." I just didn't know there was a camp there until the last moment. The camp was so heavily guarded that practically nobody escaped from there. Only the closest who were also helping knew what was going on there. Because amongst the guards and so on, there were people who went there because they also wanted to help. It's just that war is not that clear-cut that just somebody is going to kill others. Someone goes to help even to hell like Goleszów."

  • Full recordings
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    Brno, 19.05.2021

    (audio)
    duration: 01:36:13
    media recorded in project Příběhy regionu - JMK REG ED
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He who saved a life saved the world

Edita Krystýnková in the early sixties
Edita Krystýnková in the early sixties
photo: witness archive

Edita Krystýnková was born as Barbara Pfeifer on 17 January 1942 in Warsaw to a mixed marriage between an evangelical school headmistress and a Jewish lawyer. Soon after her birth, her twin brother died, and her parents’ marriage broke up. Her mother’s help to Jewish children in the Warsaw ghetto led to her arrest and transport to Auschwitz. However, mom Emilia Pfeifer and one other woman managed to escape. At that time, little Edita was hidden from the Gestapo by her mother’s friends until her grandmother found her and took her in. Edita Krystýnková then spent the rest of the war at her grandmother’s home in Dziegielow, near the Goleszów concentration camp. She did not meet her mother again until after the war in 1945 at the border with Silesia. Mrs. Bielesz, a Jewish woman who had lost her family during the war, helped them overcome this difficult time by offering them a new home. Later, due to her mother’s serious illness, Edita Krystýnková couldn’t start any studies. She overcame all the hardships of her life thanks to her faith and belonged to the Messianic Jewish movement. In 2021, she lived in Brno.