Hana Adlerová

“I’d rather not speak about our standing after our return from exile. People treated us variously. I remember going by train after the war with my cousin, who had spent the war in England thanks to Winton. She spoke English. And someone in the compartment remarked: ‘Well lookie, before the war the Jews spoke German, and now they speak English.’ It was unpleasant, so you remember that. But it was okay overall. My father was a specialist, so people accepted him. It was difficult with ordinary people, for whom Jews were still a foreign element. When they found out where we were during the war, they begrudged us that we’d fled. Those are the things that people see. The fact that we owned a house before the war, which we didn’t get back, that they didn’t see...”

“It was February 1948 and things changed. People started informing on us. Say, that my fifteen-year-old brother had celebrated the American hockey victory over Russia. Such a silly matter. But it got written down, and then they reprimanded my father for it together with other things they read out to him during some kind of trial. The funny thing was that the committee included Jews that my father had healed after the war. They invited my father and read out what he had done wrong and what his wife and son had done wrong. Dad got up and left, and with Mum they decided we had to flee again.”