Lída Tarmesar

“On our way to lunch we encountered a soldier. My younger sister thought he was Polish. But I said that he didn’t have an eagle but a lion, so he couldn’t be Polish but he should be Czech. We came up to him and started to chat in Russian with him. After just a few minutes he said: “Aren’t you girls Jewish?” I said: “So it is”. He told us that his family is Jewish as well. He said that he’ll find us a place where we could wash ourselves and sleep and that the next day he’ll take us to the general staff. He told us not to speak and said that he’ll take care of everything. He testified that he was our relative and signed that testimony. They then sent us with two Czech soldiers into the city to buy uniforms – we got so much clothing that it was almost too much to carry it back.”

“We were allowed to take 25 kilos. They let us take a bed or some other piece of furniture. The Poles gave us some horses and carts so we could actually get to the Russian border. As soon as we set out on our journey, we saw our Polish neighbors storming our house and carrying out our furniture. They took our mirrors and all the other furniture. The war makes people greedy. It makes people want more for less money. They took everything they could out of our house. When we came to the Russian border the Germans there were even worse then the Poles. When they saw a ring on the finger of a girl they simply snatched it. They took what they could from us.”

“We were in many cities and we ended up in a small town. They found a huge house for our family which consisted of my father, my mother and six children. This house belonged to a 90-year-old woman and her 70-year-old daughter. It had something like four or five rooms. They didn’t ask them to accommodate us in the house, they simply ordered it. They didn’t ask there. It was a dictatorship, a terrible dictatorship. When Stalin ordered something, it had to be done and the people were scared. If someone didn’t agree, he could have been exiled to Siberia. The people in whose house we lived didn’t like it but there was nothing they could do about it.”

“Papa said we’ll go far, far away so that we won’t see any Germans and war again. So we did and went as far as Tashkent and there we lived in a Kolkhoz because my father thought it was better for us to dwell in the countryside then in the cities as small children weren’t able to work and we didn’t have any occupation or qualification. We worked outside on the field harvesting potatoes so we could take some potatoes and sometimes even tomatoes home. So in Tashkent we had enough food and we were waiting for the war to come to an end.”