Věra Zárubová

“There was Františka Kreuzmannová and Elna Ganzová in my class, and when the border region was annexed, that is, when the Jews came under attack and were persecuted, suddenly one day they just didn’t come to school and no one told us why. In short, it was as if they had never been part of our class. That was the [school] year of 1938-1939. When we chanced upon our classmates in the street, Františka spoke to me only one single time ever - she said: ‘You’re not allowed to associate with me at all, you don’t know me, and we won’t greet each other, we don’t know each other.’ From then on, if we happened to meet, they would cross over to the other side of the street and circumvent us. We met them several more times, but we never spoke another word together any more; they wore the yellow star.”

“The whole class was assigned to forced labour in the arms industry, in a German firm that produced aircraft components. The work was in three shifts, mornings from six to two, afternoons from two to ten [p.m.], nights from ten to six. They would count our components towards the end of the shift. We had them displayed on our table, to show how many we’d made. What we did is that we quietly moved the parts from table to table, so we fulfilled the quota, while in actual fact we didn’t produce even half of what the plan required. The boys used to take an accordion with them, and past eight o’clock there was dancing and merriment on the shop floor. But that was only right before the end of the war, when the German foremen knew that the war was lost, and they behaved very nicely to us. They tried to build up an alibi, that they had always been very kind to us.”