Ivo Raab

"In Prague, it was such a sad event, because I no longer had a father, my father died of tuberculosis, so someone had to watch over me. And because already in Smržovka my parents had some contact with Jews who fled from Germany and provided them with information here and somehow spent the night with us, my mother was looking for a maid. We had a kind of a maid, a Jewish girl, who was twenty-one years old, her name was Anna Hönig, and she took care of me. I went to first grade, so she accompanied me. But she had a certain principle, the Jews had to be marked by that Jewish star, and she refused to wear it. And to avoid any inconvenience, so when we went to the city or we went to Podolí to Žluté lázně to swim, we spoke German together so that people would think we were Germans, and the Czech police could not legitimize the Germans. So we actually masked it. And she stayed with us for over a year, but then her mother was a civil servant, so they wouldn't let her. Then she was a housekeeper at a factory in Karlín or Hloubětín, but unfortunately she did not avoid it, the expulsion. She got to Terezín and then we never heard from her again. After the war, we contacted the Red Cross and learnt that she had died in Auschwitz. Then, when I was older, I already had children, I have a son, who is in Prague. So I said, 'David, you're in Prague, go ask the Jewish community if we can get any information about Anna.' So we did, unfortunatelly sad news, as she was transported from Terezin shortly to nowadays Belorussia and it was a liquidation concentration camp, where, when they were brought in, the Jews were actually shot there."

"How did you spend childhood? You were born, then the war started, what was your opinion?" - "Well, as a child you have no opinion, do you? We lived in Smržovka before the war. My mother worked at the post office as a clerk, and when it was the year 1938 when the border region was taken over, we evacuated to Prague. The evacuation was quite dramatic, because the Czechs who went from Smržovka, were mainly railway workers and postmen, they were government officials and they had to return to the interior. So we evacuated, they assigned us a freight car, there were some pieces of furniture, not much, because there were more families. We took the train to Cologne. It took a long time, they wrapped me in a blanket, pushed me somewhere from the corner, I was four and a half years old, so you don't even remember it that much. And then we lived for a while in Dolní Počernice, and before my mother was assigned a new place at the post office, we stayed in Počernice for a while and then my mother got a place in Prague at the intercity headquarters in Žižkov. Then we moved to Prague and we first lived in Vršovice, where we lived in a new building, it was quite a modern house, and then my mother actually told me: 'You know, the Jews themselves live here in the house', and we were the only ones Gentiles there. I remember when the Jews had to report for transport to Terezín or alike, I remember that they gathered, had some bags and waited for them to come, or they had to take a tram to the Trade Fair Palace in Prague, where they gathered, and then left for Terezín. So I kind of remember this time. And I didn't quite understand why the Jews had to move somewhere. Nothing was explained to children much, because the time was such that it was best when the little ones knew nothing so as not to say something stupid somewhere. That was during the protectorate, as it was after forty-eight years under communism. It was also good not to talk anywhere."