"What was it like to live when people were outlawed and when you waited every day to see what would come next and what you would be restricted and what you would lose. Someone was always going around and taking radios and other things. Then they took our properties, then our coats, then we weren't allowed out of town, then I got kicked out of school. In March the Germans came and we weren't allowed to go to school after the holidays. I was a year short of graduating from high school."
"On June 26th was the first transport and immediately afterwards, two or three days later, the second transport went. We went to Olomouc, there we were in a kind of meadow waiting for the train. I have the impression that we spent the night on that plain. Then the passenger train came and we crossed over to Bohušovice and there the boys from the transportleitung were waiting with the carts, they loaded our luggage there, and we went to Terezín."
"I saw terrible things there. In the attics of the Hamburg barracks there were poor people lying on straw. A terrible smell because they were sick. Dysentery was rampant there. It was terrible. Dead, alive, barely crawling. Those who could, went to get food, but mostly they couldn't because they were lying in the excrement. It was horrible. Mostly it was German transports of poor old people."
Larissa Simek, née Grünwald, was born on 14 December 1920 in Barnaul, Siberia, Russia. Her father Oskar was of Jewish origin and her mother Agniya of Russian origin. Her parents met when her father was captured as an officer in the Russian army during World War I. In 1920, the father returned to Czechoslovakia with his daughter and wife. The family then owned the Albert B. Grünwald men‘s, boys‘ and children‘s clothing factory in Prostějov. In 1941, Larissa married a Jewish doctor, Rudolf Schick. A year later she was transported to Terezín with her husband and father. While Larissa remained in the Terezín ghetto where she remained until the end of World War II, her husband and father were taken to Auschwitz in 1944. She was reunited with her husband, but nearly all of her relatives lost their lives. At the age of 54, her father also died in Auschwitz. After the war, the couple changed their surname to the less German-sounding Šimek. In 1948 their son Tomáš was born and three years later they moved to Poprad for employment. After the death of her husband, Larissa returned to Prostějov after forty-one years, where she and her son continued to live in 2019.
