Igor Ocelka

"After the invasion I stayed in Yugoslavia. From Yugoslavia I went to Austria, from Austria I went to Germany. I was repeating my mother's little journey, but under better conditions. And in Germany I did, but because I got sick and was advised to send my son home, I sent my son and my wife home. And I stayed out there by myself. But because I was going to have surgery and then I needed to have aftercare, after the surgery, so I wanted my wife to come over there to see me. They wouldn't let her go. They said she was, let me put it in the Brno dialect, such a fligna, trying to fool them, claiming that no surgery was needed. Later, when the doctor told me it was necessary to proceed with the operation, I decided to leave Germany and return home. So, I went back, had the surgery here, stayed in the country, and after that, I had no chance to go abroad again."

"Just before my father went abroad, my parents got married. And I was born when my father was already in France or when he was in Poland. So I was born because my father, according to what my mother told me, burned some documents at the airport and the Gestapo was looking for him. It was the Gestapo or the police and they were looking for him because he had decided to leave the Republic. And I was born after he was out of the Republic. I was brought up by my grandmother and grandfather, they were my mother's parents, and because my father was wanted by the Gestapo or the police, my mother was interrogated. She took me to my parents and told them that she was going skiing. That was sometime in January or February, I don't know. I don't remember the month exactly, I've forgotten it because of my age. So she left as if to ski, but she ran away through Hungary, Slovakia, Greece, Serbia to Palestine and from Palestine to Egypt, and from Egypt she went to Mombasa and there she boarded a ship, because father paid for her trip, so she went to England to see my father."

"I saw my mother for the first time in forty-seventh year when she came here to take us to England. She had this shop there, and that we could work as a family. So we would live somewhere, she said - I remember this - that we would live somewhere near London. Because we'd have a little house. We had rabbits there and I don't know, a vineyard, so I think she wanted us to go there. My grandfather would have eventually wanted to go, because my grandfather was a National Socialist and he could see that it wasn't going to be much of a place, but there was no way my grandmother was going to go, and neither was I. Because I had friends here and I couldn't imagine being anywhere without my grandmother. I thought of my grandmother as my mother because she raised me. And so I didn't want to go to England. So my mother said she'd sort it out here, she'd get some money. So she spent two months here going to the authorities. She had the shop there, but she said she couldn't do anything here. But they took her papers when she was in Prague, so she had to hand them in for the next procedure. She had some spare documents, because they warned her when she came here to take us there that it was going to be communists here. That all those who were in the West were going to be in trouble. So she had spare papers, because she wasn't running away for the first time, she had already run halfway around the world that winter. So she went to Vienna to get the replacement papers. She spoke English and went to England via Vienna. And I haven't seen her since. Until, I think, 1964."