“What we did was that my husband rejected his own citizenship; it took about a year. Then, he stayed here as a stateless person, so they couldn’t keep him in here. He arranged for a job invitation to France, got a permission to stay in France or a long-term French visa, and based on that, me and my son applied for the permission to leave with him. We were told that while they couldn’t detain him, they wouldn’t let us go. So, we kept appealing until they let us go.”
“Dad was very lucky because Eichmann chose him. I’m not sure if the story is known. Eichmann decided to test the final solution of the Jewish question in a dedicated area in September or October 1939. He chose northern Moravia, around Ostrava, and deported all the local men aged between 18 and 30 or maybe 35; I don’t know exactly. Since concentration camps as such were not in existence yet or completed at the time… well, I’m no historian, so this information is not guaranteed, as there must have been some concentration camps already. Anyway, this group of young men were deported to the [future] Nisko concentration camp, a well-known location in the east of Poland. There was nothing at all at the time; they took them to a green field and told them to build a concentration camp. They worked, building the site, carrying bricks and so on. It was possible to escape from there, even though it was guarded by dogs and so on. At the time, it was not the typical concentration camp surrounded by electrical wires. He managed to escape one night. It was close to the Soviet Union border.”
Marcela Maftoul was born in Prague on 11 March 1947. Her Jewish parents had managed to survive the hardships of World War II but the family was severely affected. They had no relatives left and her mother never mentioned her true origins or name. The witness’s father JUDr. Albert Neumann was forbidden to work as a lawyer from the 1950s and worked as a Russian teacher. Marcela completed her French-Russian studies at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University (FFUK). Thanks to that, she went on a study stay to Leningrad where she met her future husband. Several years after their wedding in Czechoslovakia, they left the country for France. Marcela worked as a university teacher, translator and interpreter. She completed Eastern European Studies on the Sorbonne and multimedia engineering at the Institut polytechnique de Grenoble; she subsequently worked as a tuition technology engineer at the University of Grenoble. She collaborated with Pavel Tigrid’s Svědectví magazine in exile. Currently (2023), she and her husband live in Corenc, France and come back to Prague regularly.
