"I saw how my mother and especially my grandmother were devastated. I knew my grandmother as an optimist who always said, 'It's like nothing worse will happen to us.' I was interested, the history was new to me. It was only a short time before, about six months before, that I had learned in the Pinkas synagogue that we were Jews, and even then they didn't talk much about it. Then I started asking questions. And my mother, when she talked about it, she talked mostly about happy things. Like how they went to work in the fields in Terezín. And some girl there told my mom that she was impossible, that she was pulling plants instead of weeds. And she said to her, 'Little Hana , please, lie down behind the bush here, we'll wake you up when we go back home again.' So my mother didn't do anything in that farming and she was hanging out behind the bush, because otherwise they would have gotten in trouble because of her."
"When I went to pioneer camp, it was traumatic. My mother read that we had to wear a blue skirt or pants. Of course, pants were for boys and skirts were for girls. But my mom decided that she wasn't going to give me a skirt for camp. So she gave me pants to go with my pioneer costume. Which wouldn't have mattered so much, but the blue pants were jeans with studs that my dad had brought back from some convention in Paris. And they forbade me to go to the roll call. We used to have morning roll calls where we saluted the flag. And I was the only girl in the whole camp, where there were eight hundred to a thousand kids, who wasn't allowed to go to those marches. You couldn't do it in those jeans. I cried for the first day, two or three days, and then I decided it was actually a good thing because while they were marching, I was reading in my tent."
"I only learned the story relatively recently when I met a distant relative of mine who lives in the United States. Her name is Redman, but she was Gerstl when she was single. Gerstl was one of my great-uncles. And his brother, who was also named Gerstl, was an architect. He was looking for a job in the US before the war, and he wasn't very good at it. Then when he was on a boat from the United States, he saw some people on board whispering something in German. He wanted to approach them, but then he noticed that they had swastikas on their lapels, so he didn't go up to them. They were tracing something. And every time they left the ship's canteen, Uncle Gerstl would draw the lines they were making on the tablecloth. Then when he came to Prague, he took it to the American Embassy, saying that maybe it would be interesting for the Americans. The next day the ambassador called him and wanted him to come to him. He thanked him for his service to the United States. To this day, no one knows exactly what it was, probably some kind of espionage. And the ambassador told him that as many as 25 of his relatives were allowed to enter the United States. This was in early 1939, when it was all but impossible. And the worst part of it was that my great-grandmother said that this was stupid, that they wouldn't emigrate, that we had already lived here for centuries, that these Germans were civilized and Nazism would stop. She was such a matriarch of the whole family, so only the family of the architect left. His daughter, now ninety-eight years old, told me about it. And it was terrible because most of the people who didn't leave were killed afterwards during the war. And the great-grandmother survived, which must have been terrible for her. She came back from that concentration camp and most of her children and grandchildren were killed."
Eva Hnízdová was born on 24 October 1953 in Prague into a Jewish-Czech medical family. Her mother, Hana Kubátová, née Nettlová, survived imprisonment in the Terezín ghetto and the Small Fortress, where her father and brother perished. Her father Rudolf Kubát was half-Jewish. After 1948, the Nettl family’s property was nationalized, especially the paper factories in Pacov and Červená Řečice, and many relatives emigrated. During her childhood, Eva learned little about her family’s Jewish roots, and she did not find out the truth about her origins until she was 14. After graduating from the Wilhelm Pieck Gymnasium in Prague, she studied medicine and worked as a hospital, district and factory doctor in Litoměřice and Prague. In 1978 she married archaeologist and historian Bořivoj Hnízdo. In 1986, they emigrated to Great Britain via West Germany. There Eva passed her medical exams and worked in a hospital. She later became a general practitioner. In the 1990s, her husband Bořivoj Hnízdo returned to the Czech Republic to work. Eva stayed in England where she worked as a GP until her retirement. She captured her story in her book Diagnosis London and her family’s experiences are also reflected in the fictional story of the novel Why Didn’t They Leave.
