Inge Hájková

"And there, when I went to that sixth grade at another school, the teacher gave me a paper where my mother had to write down when I walked, when I talked and many other things. And she left half of it blank. I complained to the girl next door and I said, 'Slavka, look, she has one only daughter and she doesn't know when she went, when she spoke.' She said, 'Well, I heard her and my mom talking together.' And that she wasn't my own, that she was like my aunt.' I don't remember her giving me any hugs. I don't remember, for example, on my birthday, interestingly enough, there wasn't a moment when I got something from her. On my birthday, on a holiday. That was when I was called Vlasta, when they changed my name to Vlasta, it was on the twenty-third of December, so they always said, you get it on the twenty-fourth all together and it was. But alas, if I had forgotten to wish her, like for the holiday, she would have complained somehow."

"My name is Inge Hájková, I was born in The Hague, Holland, on August 17, 1943. My mother was Dutch, my father German. My father was a sailor during the war and he found my mother there in Holland in Scheveningen. When I was born, he took my mother and me and took us to Brno, where only my grandfather lived, my grandmother had died shortly before. Then my mother lived there until she was forty-five. She spoke German to me, because when my father arrived I had to understand him. She didn't speak to me in Dutch, but in German. Well, after that, when the war ended and the Germans lost, my father was missing because they were supposedly captured by the English. My grandfather was actually German, so he had to leave, so my mother went with me to Holland. But on the way in Prague she had to put me in hospital because I had otitis media. The doctor told her I wouldn't survive the last transport. And they said that if she hadn't left on that last transport, she might not have made it there. So she went to her sister-in-law in Brno. That was my own father's sister. I don't really know how they arranged it. Well, she just wanted to take me there for a while, I guess, that she had to go to Holland. Well, when she came back to the hospital, she - that was actually my aunt, my own father's sister - she was already talking to the doctor there. So my mother had to leave, and after a while I went with my aunt to Brno."