“The war ended in May and we were still there till the end of June. Throughout June, lists from the Red Cross with the names of the living and dead were coming in. Everyone was looking for their relatives on these lists. Thus I knew that my mom had died of typhoid in Terezín, but my dad was in the list of those who were alive. That was the reason why I returned to Prague.”
“My name is Dagmar Šímová, I was born Deimlová. I was born in March 1928 in Prague, but I spent my entire childhood in Strakonice, where I lived until 1939. I also attended the elementary school there. In 1939, my parents somehow, I don’t know how, managed to get me on the train which Nicolas Winton dispatched for England.”
“I became a bit concerned at the railway station when I was leaving because I was accompanied by my mom, dad and grandpa. Grandma was not there with us, she did not have the courage to go to the station. We boarded the train and as we were looking out of the windows, my mom was crying. This didn’t surprise me because she would cry even when she was sending me to my grandma’s for a fortnight. But when I saw that my dad and grandpa, two men, were also crying, I became very disconcerted because this seemed strange to me.”
“Later he came here, I think in 1991 for the first time. Then he was coming here often, but when he came for the first time, we all went to the airport to welcome him and each of us was holding a rose in his hand. The information of his arrival was widely spread because people came from Slovakia, there were schoolmates from Moravia, they were scattered all over. Some lived in Český Krumlov and a couple of us in Prague. We all met at the airport and it was very touching because each of us gave him that rose and told him what his number had been.”
“Unfortunately, what happened was that the leaders of our transport forgot all documents at the committee in Prague, which had organized it all. We thus arrived to Terezín, which was the very last town in Czechoslovakia at that time. Further on there was the Sudetenland, which was already part of the German Reich then. There was a border crossing, and they did not let us pass without the documents So, we waited there for three hours before they managed to get the documents from Prague. These three hours were terrible because we were already supposed to be in Holland at that time, where we were to receive some refreshments for the fist time. Before we got there, we had only what our parents had given us for the journey. We were all very hungry and thirsty.”
Dagmar Šímová, née Deimlová, was born March 19, 1928 in Prague. However, she spent her childhood in Strakonice. She completed an elementary school and in 1939 her parents sent her on the Winton Train via Holland to their relatives in England. There she attended a boarding school, from which she graduated. Then for one year before the end of the war she was studying at the Czechoslovak school in Great Britain, located in Wales. None of her closest relatives have survived the war. In Czechoslovakia she had her diploma recognized and she was admitted to university, but she was dismissed in 1949. She was working for the Czechoslovak Railways and thanks to her stay in England and her language proficiency, she was also tutoring children from an English school and working as a translator in the Czech Press Office. She currently lives in Prague.
