Eva Václavíková

“After the war, my mother had to examine Germans before they were displaced. There was a lady who just had a baby. We lived on food rations after the war so my mother would sometimes bake a cake and brought it to her with a portion of milk. The lady could not breastfeed because of the stress she went through. And when my mom had to take gold and jewelry from them – Czechs did the same Germans had done to them before – she would give this jewelry back to the baby’s napkins so that nobody could see that. She knew what horror some of those women went through in Theresienstad, once she saw an SS Gruppenführer Rahm trampling a child to death with his horse. The Red Cross came and the guards built a playground so they could see that the Jews do not really suffer there. Children had to call him Onkel Rahm (uncle Rahm) and when the Swiss Red Cross went away there was a very small child who called him Onkel Rahm and he killed it right away. My mother saw all those atrocities and she was so sad from all that she would never do any harm to a child.”

“My name is Eva Václavíková born as Binnhacková. My mother was Irma Binnhacková and my Jewish name is Sulamit. I was born on Feb. 27th 1933 in Strakonice. A lot of people lost their jobs at that time and people went on strikes. My Jewish granddad Edmund Kohn was fired from a clothes manufacture after a strike. Because the manufacture was Jewish, he got a pension and he began trading with game meat. In the morning, my mother took me to my grandma and grandpa Malvína and Edmund Kohn who took care about me. Because they fired my granddad, they hired my mother and my aunt as secretaries in the same company. The unemployment rate was really high at the time. At the age of three I got polio. And it was a Jew, doctor Deiml, who saved my life. He was an uncle of the later U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. His daughter Milena Deimlová was a friend of mine. In 1939 my grandma died, but I didn’t really get to know her well. My mother’s oldest sister moved to my granddad and she spent a year there – until 1940. In 1940, granddad died and in 1942 we all were branded with the Jewish yellow stars.”

“From 1942, we had to wear the yellow star on our coats. And because my father was a Christian he protected us. He protected my mother but because I was Jewish I was expected to be transported to a concentration camp sooner than my mother. As in the book of Ota Pavel, children were separated. People usually gave us a memo of the transfers so my father always took me away. He had a sister in Mutěnice so I was always hidden there until the deportations left. When my mother was supposed to go, her doctor prescribed that she can’t go for health reasons. He also prescribed the same thing to me so we didn’t leave with the first transfer. So we went as late as 1942 when they announced that they would come home for anyone who couldn’t be transported for health reasons. That would be much worse, those people went straight to the gas chamber. It was also a great risk for the doctor, same as had been for professor Voráček who baptized me in 1940. He was a friend of my father, so he baptized me but it wasn’t acknowledged. He also risked being persecuted or transferred to a concentration camp.”

“Grandma always said: ‘Your dad will come home when the war is over. But your mum will not come back, she won’t survive. Theresienstadt is much worse than Bystřice.’ The happier I was on 11th of May when a lorry stopped in front of the house and my father came out and there was my mother, small and tiny. He carried her down from the lorry as if she were a child. She weighted 36 kilograms and her head was shaved. My father escaped from Bystřice to Prague before the Uprising started and my mom escaped from Theresienstadt on 4th of May. Somebody who worked at the railway helped her to get to Prague where she met my father. He was defending one of the houses and my mother was piling up barricades (during the Prague Uprising). Meeting them was the best thing that happened to me in my entire life, apart from the fact that later I had two children.”