“I participated in some leftists activities in secondary school, similar to the movement Young culture, and for the student magazine, I was involved in helping Spain and helping German emigrants, who were coming [into the country]. This job led a little to my rescue in that progressive students in other countries organized ways to save progressive students in our country, and in this manner I actually made it to England because progressive English students knew the very active students here [in Czechoslovakia] and organized visas for them in England. So, in July of ’39, I went to Poland illegally. In Poland, in Katowice, was the British Consulate and from there was organized additional transportation for emigrants to England, on the condition that at the consulate you had permission from the British Foreign Office. There was a problem for a large number of emigrants who made it into Poland and had great difficulties getting permission if they didn’t have it already. Whereas I was fortunate, when I got there, my permit was already at the consulate in Katowice, so I took the earliest transport to England, which I daresay was just before the war broke out. I have to say honestly that I didn’t want to go at all because we had a strong camaraderie among us students. When a young person has to leave such an environment… On the other hand, if I hadn’t gotten it, then I would have stayed and ended up like a large number of people of my background somewhere in a concentration camp.”
“My heroism was that I worked in health care. It was the situation that there were not many serious cases of our soldiers because our unit was deployed towards the end of the war, after the second front was opened and to a position that did not have much direct confrontation with the German army. In regards to the pilots, they mostly didn’t come to us in the hospital because they were actually part of the British Army, so they went to the English hospitals, that is, if they were lucky enough to survive the battles. There weren’t too many of them – either they survived, or they didn’t. Our soldiers came in with similar health problems as Czech emigrants. Because in a way, we, who lived in London, for example, we were much more exposed to the suffering of war than our partners, who were in the military units because those military units were always in the middle of nowhere. Whereas we lived in London, where there was bombing from morning till evening and evening till morning. We provided those emigrants and soldiers normal health care. We had a few cases of burns, but there were actually very few. Interestingly enough, despite the fierce bombing, there actually wasn’t a single case of an emigrant being killed by a bomb.”
“In the end, England had to start to arm itself and move politically in a new direction than under Chamberlain, so even the status of emigrants began to change. And here it is important to know one thing: The emigration that the Trust Fund cared for was very complicated. At first there were these Czechs who had their own section, which cared for the Czechs, and were still divided by political groups – Social Democrats, Communists, People’s Party… That Trust Fund was, I would say, democratically organized because some work was done by the English, but only the key positions, while they wanted the emigrants to govern themselves. And later, there was German antifascist emigration from Czechoslovakia, those were mainly people from the Sudetenland, and they again divided themselves into Social Democrats or Communists…. Then there were German Germans who emigrated into Czechoslovakia and later into England, if they succeeded, and also Austrian Germans. So emigration was very complicated, and for a period of time, the situation was that emigrants as a whole were regarded as a dangerous, erratic body. For example, there was a period of time when all German-speaking emigrants were interned. It was very civilized, they [the British] had special internment camps that can’t be compared to anything imaginable under this name, those people had decent food, only they could not move freely around England.”
“The English are very brave, but, as I say, the main thing is that man gets used to anything, even the gallows. If he was always fearful that a bomb would kill him, then he would go mad, it was better to leave London… There was enormous solidarity among the people, for example, English women worked perfectly as ambulance drivers because men were mostly in the army. On the roofs, there were women lookouts who would see where a bomb fell and report it, and immediately a rescue guardian would go there so no one would stay buried. Everything worked nicely, there was no panic, people formed queues for everything that was necessary, no one jumped in line. People were so used to it, it was quite interesting during the air raids because, first of all, fighter planes were flying and shining their lights… Secondly, the sky was constantly crossed with search lights, and they were shooting the antiaircraft guns, which looked like fireworks. So people stood on the sidewalks and stared at the beautiful theater. The newspaper wrote to tell people to stop being fools because people were killed not by the bombs, but by the shrapnel from those antiaircraft shells, which, when they fell, had tremendous power. They were hot and sharp, so they got buried deep into concrete, those shell fragments. This killed a lot of people! One can warn people not to stand in the streets and stare up when there is an air raid… I once spoke with an English woman, and she told me: ‘You know, today that Hitler really made me mad. Imagine, I bought myself a new tea pot (those are their ceramic pots for tea), an air raid came, a bomb fell and the tea pot broke.’ She had had enough of Hitler…”
“When the situation of the labor market started to get worse for the English because the war machine took off and a number of qualified men joined the army, it forced [the English] to give us immigrants the opportunity to get into some professions where there began to be labor shortages. The English called these professions ‘war effort’. Factories fell into this category, and there were opportunities for welders and machine operators, and later in agriculture, above all in forestry, mainly because they used the cut-down trees to make telephone poles or for timbering in mines because the mining industry started growing. As the war increased England’s isolation (due to submarine warfare), a number of things they had previously imported had to be produced in England. So, agriculture, forestry and factories worked for the war. Many of our emigrants learned new skills so they could work in those factories. With my first husband, for example, we were in northern Wales, where we worked in forestry. By then, the situation improved quite a bit for us, and we were no longer regarded as unreliable. So when someone worked the night shift, you couldn’t restrict whether they were allowed out at night. That was the year 1940.”
“I come from a generation that was actually the same age as the First Republic. I was born in 1918 in Prague and I grew up in a Czech-Jewish family. I had finished grammar school, I graduated in ’37 from a college that no longer exists – it was the Charlotte Masaryk Girls City Lyceum on Dusni street. I then began to study medicine, but I only finished three semesters because in ’39 they were already throwing Jews out of universities and later all universities were closed.”
“I married a Czech when we worked in Wales in the forests. We later divorced here at home, but remained good friends. This is how it was: most of us, when we left home, I had a boyfriend, for example, and he had his girlfriend and everything was disrupted, broken. You also had older people who left into exile and their partners couldn’t get out, they were married before they left and didn’t know what happened to their partners. So there (in exile – Ed. note), many got married with the understanding that the final solution (today, this description sounds bad) for these new relationships was postponed until returning home.. And, of course, when they came home and their partner had survived and returned from a concentration camp, of course, those that had lived in England returned to their original partners because it would be unfair otherwise. We weren’t married, but we knew that when we returned we wouldn’t know how our meetings with our old partners would look, those who we had nice relationships with before the war. We got married there because the English at the time thought it was strange when two people that weren’t married lived together in one apartment, today it’s different, both here and there. But at the time, that’s how it was and it had to be respected, of course.”
Hana Mejdrová was born July 7th, 1918 in Prague to a Czech-Jewish family. She graduated from a girls lyceum, and before the war, she studied three semesters of medicine. She was influenced by leftist, cultural avant-garde, and was involved in youth antifascist activities. Thanks to her international contacts, she succeeded in emigrating through Poland to Great Britain shortly before the outbreak of war. There, she had refugee status. After the opening-up of the British labor market, in conjunction with wartime, she worked in forestry in Wales. In the year 1941, she signed up as a nurse in a pavilion set up by the Czech Red Cross, located in the London’s Hammersmith Hospital, for soldiers and emigrants from Czechoslovakia. In Britain, she married a member of the Czechoslovak army. After the war, she returned to Czechoslovakia but did not continue studying medicine. Instead, an interest in history brought her to study the subject, and she dedicated herself to it professionally. In her research, she focused primarily on the history of leftist movements in the first half of the 20th century.
