"We had Marxism-Leninism instead of paediatrics. We didn't have paediatrics, and we had a state course in that, it was a bit of a headache... Medicine wasn't completely saturated, but it was there too. We started our surgical internship by going to some five-minute political thing. We had one girl there whose mother was half Russian, and she was always very active politically, she always ran the five-minute sessions. And the teacher said to me at the time that how is it possible that Masha here knows so much and is so capable, and I don't. I made a statement, like that's the last thing I would have thought was important for this medicine."
"It wasn't there how she met the younger girl, the friend - she described her as more like her daughter, she was her mommy or her protector. And that was the future godmother of mine, her name was Doris, she met her in Lodz. They lived together through the end of the war. There were two of them, and it gave her a little bit of strength, I guess, for both of them to survive. During that death march, my mother developed tuberculosis, which she had had before. She says that she was very weakened, that she knew she couldn't go on, and that if someone didn't make it through the march and was left behind, the Germans shot them. So in some of the first villages where it was possible, she escaped. She had arranged with this Dorcas that she would come to her. But she didn't come to her. So she came back again because she didn't want to lose her again. She told her that when it went somewhere she would do it again, and that she expected her to join her. And that's where it happened. There, at that one place, maybe five or six of them got away. It was some Polish village, but again she didn't know the name of it, where they got into some house where there were Polish farmers. They did report them to the Germans, but nobody liquidated them, they survived."
Doris Maturová, née Zmeškalová, was born on 29 October 1959 in Prague, where she grew up. Both her parents were politically uninvolved opponents of the communist regime. Her father Miroslav worked as an economist in the North Bohemian glassworks in Nový Bor, her mother Stella, née Grafová, was also an economist, working in Prague. The family also included her brother Tomáš, three years older. Doris is named after her godmother, her mother‘s closest friend. Stella Graf and Doris Adler together survived imprisonment in the Nazi ghetto in Lodz during World War II, the Auschwitz concentration camp and the death march from which they escaped. Stella did not like to talk about her past with her children - Tomas and Doris - but she recorded her memories on audio during the 1990s. Doris Maturová went into medicine after finishing high school, graduating in 1983. A year before finishing her university studies, her son Jiří was born. She worked for a year in the ENT department of the Vinohrady hospital, then moved to the ENT department of the Bulovka hospital. After the November Revolution she opened a private ENT practice with a colleague. In 2024 she lived and worked in Prague.
