JUDr. Hana Nová

"Dr. Koppl was much remembered. My daddy got this terrible rheumatism, and he brought daddy a handful of acylpyrine and said, 'Eat this and it'll get better.' And my daddy said, 'Where did you get this?' - 'It's just rationing for the range.' And my daddy said, 'Don't be silly, I can't eat this for all the others.' And he said, 'Look, if I had to have one for everyone, I'd give everyone a quarter and it wouldn't help anyone. if I give it to three or four people, I'll save their lives, maybe.' And it really saved my dad's life. Dr. Koppel, he was a Moravian, was remembered for the rest of their lives, because my daddy then operated the boilers in Schwarzheide, I may have mentioned that. Which was just great, because it was warm there and he didn't have to haul that horrible cement. He always said he needed a helfer, and they gave him some boy who needed to rest really bad, to warm himself up, to get himself together a little bit. Once, people came, telling my daddy that someone got burned real bad. And my dad ran to this Dr. Koppel and he said, 'Can you get an egg?' My dad had friends at the right place, so he got an egg. And he cracked it open and put the egg white on the person's burns. And the man actually got better. The doctor said, 'That's absolutely sterile. It's protein. It creates a protective film.' And so in our household, whenever anybody got burned or scalded or whatever, we would put the egg white on it and it worked just great."

"There were a lot of children at one place. They made orphanages out of castles, out of those huge units, and that's never quite right. Nowadays we also have, for example, children's homes in a castle, but they have separate apartments here and separate apartments there and they have family groups and the whole atmosphere is different. I knew a lot of people, from the directors on down to the last cook, who loved the kids and really did their best for them. Nowadays, orphanages are small, mostly small. After 1990, private orphanages started to spring up. For example, I visited a children's home in Prachatice. The director had about twelve children there and he involved his mother so that the children could get to know their grandmother. And if someone wanted a dog, they got them a dog, and if someone wanted sheep, they got them sheep. There, after that, I didn't see much difference between a big foster family and a small private orphanage. But in terms of atmosphere, there was a big difference. For example, I remember visiting a diagnostic institute once in the early 1990s. The headmistress was showing me around the institute, and to show off how orderly the children were, she would always open a cupboard and there were things neatly folded in stacks. And I thought, 'God, the poor kids are spending their time folding their laundry and sweaters into these exact cubes.' And I remembered what a mess, to be honest, my own kids have, because we're just doing... Not that our house is a mess, but... Here I was thinking that by doing this they probably wanted to discipline the kids somehow or to keep them busy. But it didn't seem right."

"I'll tell you this story related to that. We [employees of the prosecutor's office] were subjected to some kind of mandatory review and evaluation by the Communist Party District Committee, because of the position we had . It didn't matter whether one was in the Party or not. And when I first went there, they asked me, why don't I actually join the Party? Well, I said, because I had a very sick mother and two children and a family to look after, and I just didn't... And when I went there the second time, they said, 'Your mother has died, hasn't she? So now you could.' And I said, 'I'm still looking after my dad. And the kids are studying and I just really can't do it.' And after my dad died in 1984, in early 1985, there was again this evaluation going on, it happened every three years. That's when they said to me, 'Well, you see, now both your parents have died. Now you can join the Party.' So I'll never forget that either. That struck me as such a moral misery that I'll never forget it."

"They had a very hard time because they lost so many loved ones. I don't think they even recalled their own suffering as much, like in Schwarzheide, for example, when an SS man would beat my father up, he knocked out his teeth, punctured his eardrums. But I think there were things that were far worse than that. The worst was the concern for their families. My grandmother, Berti, her maiden name was Berti Klinger, she raised seven children. And my father went from Terezín to Auschwitz with a transport because of her. She was in a place called altersheim Altersheim (home for the elderly), and Daddy was so worried about her, he was so worried about her that later, after her oldest son David died in Auschwitz from some infection, a phlegmon they called it, they kept it from Grandma. Daddy brought her a piece of bread and said, 'David sent you this.' But David was no longer there. And in the end, after the Mengele selections, when he were bidding my grandmother farewell, she told him that of course she knew that David hadn't been here for a long time, that she just didn't want to complicate their lives by giving away their game. That she knew it was just a game. So I always wonder how much mental strength my grandmother must have had...”