Helena Glancová

"There was no furniture, we were on the ground, on blankets, the suitcases were there, there was a piece of furniture. “And I remember that we had our names written in white paint on the suitcases, in German. I remember exactly - though at the time I couldn’t read it yet, but we had the suitcases for months even after the war, so I remember - mine said ‘Helene Adam,’ written in big white letters. My mother had hers, and František had his. The suitcase was made of cardboard. Everything we had was in there. I was given the privilege of taking my teddy bear with me, which I had attached to my backpack - it sat on top of it. Later I was in a Kinderheim, not for very long, but I think I was there for about the last year. The girls there were really nice - they were students from the teacher-training high school in Pardubice - and they took care of us. They wanted to make me happy and took the teddy bear with them, saying he’d get some clothes for Hanukkah, that they’d sew something for him. I was completely crushed - no one could cheer me up - because losing that teddy bear was an irreplaceable loss.”

"Nothing so terrible happened to me, only I knew that many things were forbidden, many things were dangerous, forbidden too. I knew that. We made a little group of similarly aged five-, six- and seven-year-olds there. Some of them were going to the transport. This girl here with this other boy. I knew it was kind of horrible, but why it was horrible, I didn't know. And when they said they were going to the transport, I imagined a triple carriage."

“I took my ten-year-old son to Olšany [Cemetary - trans.] for All Souls Day, and we all knew which grave was the one that referred to Palach, although the name there was Marie Jedličková. Most people knew where it was, and so there were always dozens of candles burning there. It was a paradox in that there was Marie Jedličková there. I stopped there for a bit with my ten-year-old Tomáš, and he did what children do, that he lit the candles that had gone out from the other ones that were still burning. Perhaps he didn’t even really know where we were standing. A spook [undercover agent - trans.] came up and said: ‘Come here, come here...’ And he started dragging him off somewhere. I said: ‘What do you want with him?’ - ‘Is he yours?’ I said yes, that he was my son. ‘Show me your ID.’ There was a population census going on at the time. I told him I had just been filling out the census forms and had left my ID card on the table. ‘Well, then come with me.’ They took us to the closest station, wrote down our statement, and yet all that had happened was that he had been lighting candles that had gone out, more from a kind of childish... so they would burn nicely, seeing that they still had some wick left. I thought, goodness gracious, they won’t expel him from primary school for that, will they?”

“The reek of mouldy cubes of pea soup, I remember that as a smell, one I’ll never forget. Whenever I smell that kind of mustiness somewhere, I immediately think of Terezín. Rotten potatoes and stale cubes of pea soup, that is the smell of Terezín to me.”

“You had to wear the star, and I was awfully excited that when I turned six, I would also be allowed to wear it, like the other children did. Mum had a handbag, she unstitched it and wore the handbag like this, so it wouldn’t be visible, because the spot was a lighter colour. Jews were not allowed to sit in the tram, they had to stand on the platform. And one man, a complete stranger, said: ‘What’re you sitting for, off to the platform with you!’ Well, Czechs can be like that sometimes, too.”