Hugo Marom

“I remembered when our young friend Jiří Reichl and I first considered a monument to our parents at Wilson Station [now Main Station in Prague - trans.]. We and my daughter walked out on to platform number one, and I had a feeling of deja vu. The wall of the old station building on platform one, and suddenly I... I was there and I could see my father standing outside. They shut us into the train, plugged it up with seals so the children wouldn’t get off somewhere on the way, when the train stopped. Because it was clear that the train wouldn’t go all the way to Holland. There weren’t any adults in the train, only children. There were six or eight of us in the compartment, I know that there were also younger children there, that I was one of the older ones. I remember very well that when we reached the border with Holland, some Germans came and asked us how much money we had, how much we were taking out with us. We each had 14 shillings and fourpence, I remember that to this day. They didn’t believe us, they took our suitcases from the racks, opened them on the bunks; they stood there, opened them and threw everything out and left it like that and went on to the next compartment.”

“The train stopped after a whole day, perhaps it was more than a day, it stopped in Leipzig. We’d learnt at school that Leipzig had the biggest train station in the world, 22 platforms. We came to Leipzig, the train stopped, they took off the seals and let us out on to the platform. There were tables on the platform, a kind of make-shift contrivance, with sandwiches on the tables. They gave us cocoa, and there were women and men with the Jewish star standing behind [the table]. Some Germans came, SS men or whoever, and they gave each of us a card, that is, a photograph of Leipzig, that we were to write twenty-five words to our parents, that we had arrived and that we were okay.”

When people ask me when I’m planning to retire, I’m answering that I hope I will die in chair. Not here home but in my office.

“For the past several years I’ve been working with classmates from the Kindertransport, and with the support of certain people we’re trying, we decided to build a monument to the parents of the Kindertransport. Those parents who had the courage and strength to send their children aged five to fifteen - though I think there were also four-year-olds - to England, to a foreign country, without knowing when... Of course, like my father thought that the English, the French, and so on, when the war broke out, that, seeing that they won in the first world war, that it wouldn’t take long and we’d reunite. There was a certain hope of seeing each other soon. Also for us, for all the children, not just our parents but also the parents of our friends, if we talked about it, they tried to make the children feel that it was like a trip. So much so, that our mother didn’t come with us to the train station, when we left from Brno to Prague, only our father and one uncle went with us to Prague. The first time I was ever in Prague, I was ten, ten and a half. We were in Prague for four five days to check out the whole city and so on, which was very interesting, but they gave us the feeling that it’s like some trip to an interesting country. I’m sure our mother didn’t come, because she wouldn’t have managed to be at the station without breaking into tears or something. It’s not until you have children - and I have eleven great-grandchildren, and I look at them at that age and I think about what spiritual strength it must have taken to send those children away.”

“When my parents were transported to Terezín, Tonda Sekal loaded a lorry with everything and dug it somewhere near Mokrá hora, everything – money, jewelry, clothes, furniture and all the documents so that they left the flat empty for the Germans and they dug everything. And when we came back in 1945, Tonda, his sister and us two, we dug all up and I found the letters we were sending to our parents to Brno which they couldn’t read and which Tonda gathered all. The most interesting thing was that I found a receipt for the tailor that my father paid for three suits and I needed a suit for my graduation exam. I came from England with a suit and I needed a better one for the exam and because I knew the tailor, he had a shop at Špilberg, I went to see him and asked about some suits and he told me that my father had paid for three suits before the war and they were ready in the shop. And he told me he could remake them for me. So he remade all the three suits and I came and wanted to pay for them but he said: ‘Are you crazy? He paid me in 1939 and since then I kept the money and I should pay to you for the opportunity to handle the valuable currency during the war.”

“Either way, I remember Staff Captain Ocelka - he’s not with us any more - and he too was locked up, I think, because he commanded one of those squadrons in England, fighter planes, and one time he said... I already spoke about this, didn’t we already talk about it? He took us, us Czech boys, there were about 20, 22 of us, and he said: ‘There’s one thing I don’t get.’ That was towards the end of the course. ‘You signed yourselves up for six months in Israel. How do you think with 150 million Arabs - there’s no more than 600,000 people in Israel, total - how will it last even six months, this new country? Against 150 million Arabs.’ There weren’t 150 million soldiers, but those 150 million did make up five Arab armies, which were attacking Israel at the time, and of the 600,000 there were perhaps 100,000 soldiers. How could it survive? But I guess not everything depends on numbers.”

“Half way through the semester, a certain Gad Polak came from Israel and he knew that I was a cadet in England and he told me that they were going to set up a secret training facilities at the Czech air force base in Olomouc to train pilots for the forth coming Arab wars, the wars hadn’t started yet but they already knew it was going to happen. So they asked me to gather Jewish and non-Jewish students who would be willing to fight in Israel.”

“My mother was the boss… she was leading the family and in 1938, she told my father that Hitler was crazy and that he really meant the things he wrote in Mein Kampf, that he would clean the Europe and so on… and so we had to leave the country. And my father said: ‘Listen, our family has been living here for thousand years and if he wants to send us away he will have to send the ten millions of Czechs away as well.’ In our family, religion had nothing to do with nationality. And this disputes between my mother and my father went on until Hitler came to Brno.”

“I flew light planes for some time and because there were enough experienced volunteer pilots from America, South Africa, England and so on, they started flying the Messerschmitts and Spitfires that came from Czechoslovakia. We flew the light planes as a matter of observation, we guarded the border, we also did some ambulance missions, whatever could be done with those small planes.”

“It was about half past ten in the evening when an English taxi driver, a young man, came and asked us what we were waiting for and we answered that we didn’t know and he asked if we were hungry. So he put us five boys to the taxi with all our baggage, those taxi cars were huge so we all fitted in, and he took us to fish and chips. I had never eaten anything like that before, never in Brno had I tasted a fish like that. Since then I love fish and chips, I will remember that taste forever. He took us home, he had a small child and they lived in a block of flats, those were called council houses at the time. There weren’t such houses in Brno, eight or ten stories high. He let us sleep in the front room and he was looking for places where to put us. We came, I suppose, on Thursday and the whole weekend he was driving around and taking us places in East End to find a suitable orphanage but they wouldn’t take us at most of the places because we weren’t orthodox enough. It was plain to see because we didn’t have the long hair and caps and they used to bring children up in the orphanages in quite an orthodox way.”