“[Q: Can I ask about your parents? Because as you mentioned, they were somehow pressured to get divorced.] Father refused that adamantly. He said it was out of the question. Mum’s sister had married a photographer, and they also called him and told him to divorce, and he did. After the divorce my aunt went to the concentration camp, and they confiscated their photo studio anyway. That was sad. Later on he secretly took cakes to her in Terezín, but they caught him, locked him up in Pankrác, and beat him to death. They sent my aunt straight to Auschwitz because of it. So they divorced and it was for no use anyway. No, Father insisted that he would not be divorced.”
“[What happened to your grandmother when the Germans came?] Nothing, the poor thing stayed closed up in that flat on Na Bojišti Street, and she kept praying that they wouldn’t take any of hers to the concentration camps. In 1941 she had to go to Terezín. [Can you remember that, Mrs Kalvachová?] No, Mum held me aside so that I wouldn’t be there for it, because I was very strongly attached to Grandma. [Did you see your grandmother ever again? Did you get any message from her?] No, not even a postcard. Then they shoved her into a car to Auschwitz. At that moment her son Arthur saw her, he rushed up the road and jumped in with her so she wouldn’t be alone.”
“[Q: Can you describe where you went when you expected someone to come back?] Either to the town hall, that’s where we got the information that someone was supposed to return, and then, when they were already coming through Prague, we tried to recognise them, because they were really unrecognisable. They were gaunt, in rags. Some of them stumbled along the street, supported by another. [Q: How did the people in Prague behave to them?] I think they were pretty cold, no welcomes. But all the relatives were there by then, so they took them in each to their own. But say that Ota [her mother’s brother - ed.] looked some ten fifteen years older than he was. He was still a boy.”
Věra Kalvachová, née Zikánová, was born on 1 November 1928 in Prague. She spent her childhood with her parents in a charity house for the poor on Na Bojišti Street in Prague. Her mother came from a Jewish family, and unlike most of her relatives, she was not called to any of the Terezín transports. But Věra’s father, an architect, ended up in the concentration camp in Bystřice near Benešov, where the Nazis imprisoned husbands who refused to divorce their Jewish wives, among other people. Towards the end of the war he succeeded in escaping from the camp. A big authority for little Věra was her grandmother, a mother of ten, but the last time Věra saw her was when she was boarding a transport for Terezín. Uncle Ota, the brother of Věra’s mother, also ended up in a concentration camp. After the war the witness helped with the family shop, which sold men’s suits. The shop was confiscated twice - once in the 1940s by the Nazis and the second time in the early 1950s by the Communists. Until her retirement the witness worked in Prague health & beauty stores, reaching the position of shop manager. She married, bore and raised two sons, and her grandchildren live in Israel.
