Ivo Raab

"I lived in Vinohrady, the radio was nearby. There was a lot of fighting, but up there it was kind of quiet. So we would wait sitting in the basement. We also built a barricade in our street, and then, after the war, when it was over, we dismantled it. I don't know how it happened, but I got hit in the forehead with a rock. And a lot of blood comes out from head injuries. So we went to the doctor - they bandaged me up. My head was bandaged, and there were Soviet tanks in Fochovka, today's Vinohradská třída. So we went to see them and they thought I was wounded from the revolution, so they would pull me up on the tank and I could see the inside. My friends were so jealous."

"Because my mother was alone, she hired a Czech girl as a maid to look after me. She was Jewish, her name was Anny Hönigová, she was originally from Sokolov, and she was about twenty years old. She was a very pretty girl, and I took her as my older sister, and I was very attached to her. However, when things were sort of tightening up, Jews had to wear the Jewish star, and Anny didn't wear it, so it was quite dangerous. And it was known that Anny was Jewish. One time when my mother went to get food stamps at the city hall, they gave her tickets for Jews. My mother protested that we were not Jews, but the officials told her that if we had a Jew in the family, we were Jews."

"And my dad was German, and he was an employee of the savings bank. My mom was a postal clerk. My daddy was politically involved against Hitler and Henlein and was quite active. When he was transporting some political materials from Jelenia Góra in Silesia, here across the border, to the Republic, he got wet, got pneumonia and developed severe tuberculosis. So I hardly saw much of my father, because he was being treated in sanatoriums. Then the tuberculosis got so bad that there was a danger that he might infect me if we lived together. So he lived with his parents. Well, soon after that, the Sudetenland was displaced, the Germans occupied the borderlands, and the Gestapo came for my father because he was quite involved in helping the Jews and the Social Democrats who were fleeing Germany. So the Gestapo came for him, but when they saw the state he was in, they left, they left him alone. And he died a short time later."

"I fell quite ill, I got diphtheria, scarlet fever and also rose, a strange disease, in my eye. The doctors told my mother to prepare for the worst, and that if it turned out well, I would probably be blind in that eye. It turned out better because I healed well, I could see, I didn't get blind in that eye, but I was kind of drenched. The doctors said it would be a good idea if I went somewhere to the countryside. We managed to do that under certain circumstances, so we lived in the Bohemian Forest for about three quarters of a year. And it was so adventurous there because we had a room rented from this cottager, and he had two cows. One draft cow because a horse was an expensive thing, and they needed to pull carts. And the other one for milk. He had chickens, geese, and rabbits. And I was a city boy, and being able to feed the rabbits, I enjoyed that very much, and they had a field of potatoes, and they'd plough the potatoes, and the farmer would be at the plough, and I'd drive the cow in the row. Which I enjoyed very much, because driving a cow, I felt like I was almost grown up. But it was quite normal there, the younger boys came from school, and they went to herd the cows. In those days, the children were already working. They were chopping wood or logs for firewood. That was the kind of work that those kids did, so I didn't have to do that because we didn't have any farm, but that's how I lived with them. But I went mushroom picking a lot, and we dried mushrooms, and we had a lot of dried mushrooms, and we lived off that a little bit too, because we used to send it to Prague, and there was nothing during the war, so it got monetised there."

"In Prague, it was a sad event, because I didn't have a dad anymore, my dad died of tuberculosis, so someone had to look after me. And because my parents had some contacts from Smržovka with Jews who were fleeing from Germany, and they gave them information here and let them spend the night with us... So my mother looked for a maid. We had a sort of a maid, a Jewish girl, she was twenty-one years old, her name was Anny Hönig, and she took care of me. I was in the first grade, so she accompanied me. But she had this policy: Jews had to be marked with this Jewish star, and she refused to wear it. And to avoid any unpleasantness, when we went to town or when we went to Podolí to go swimming to Žluté lázně, we spoke German together so that people would think we were Germans, and the Czech police were not allowed to legitimise Germans. So we were masking it. And she stayed with us for over a year, but my mother was a civil servant, so they wouldn't let her. Then, she was a housekeeper for a factory owner in Karlín or Hloubětín, but unfortunately, she didn't escape it, the deportation. She got to Terezín, and then we never heard from her again. After the war, we looked for her through the Red Cross, and they said that she had perished in Auschwitz. Then, when I was older, I had children too, and I have a son who lives in Prague. So I said, 'David, you're in Prague, go ask the Jewish community if we can get some information about Anny.' So we did get, unfortunately, sad information. Because she was soon transported from Terezín to what is now Belarus, to a liquidation concentration camp, where when they brought them, the Jews, they just shot them right there."