"Yeah, and then we crawled from Rozdrojovice to Brno, and because there was already shooting, we went through the ditch next to the road. And the doctor was walking behind me, and his wife was walking in front of me, and now all of a sudden there's this guy standing over me saying, 'Davaj časy!' And I didn't know what 'časy' was, then, so I thought, what's he talking about the weather? 'Give me the weather!' And the one behind me said to his wife, 'Give him the watch!' So she unhooks the watch from her hand and she throws him the watch and the doctor says, 'Where are we, she's giving the watch that one doesn´t get, gives easily to this one...' And he took it and then he left."
"Well, you had to get on at a certain time too, that was a disadvantage wasn't it. I had to get on awfully early in the morning. I know I had a classmate here who was also in the electric department, so we always went. Well, I was serving on that electricity and now we're at the terminus, I was cold on my hands. So the driver came up and said, 'You know what, we'll go slow and you run behind us, you'll warm up.' So we did. And now people were saying, 'You missed the conductor!' Well, people on the sidewalks were calling for him to stop so the conductor could catch up, I remember."
"I went to school here, as I say, the octave was closed down, so I was put in charge of the electricity. They lowered all the Czechs' grades by one grade. I remember that only I was given a grade of one in mathematics. Then they collected the Jewish kids from us. Then they were sent... where were they sent, that..."
Sylva Šantavá, née Krohová, was born on 17 August 1926 in Prague into the family of architect Jiří Kroha and Miloslava Krohová. Until the age of five she grew up in Mladá Boleslav, which is strongly connected with her father’s work. At the age of five Sylva’s family moved to Brno to follow her father’s work, who was appointed professor at the Brno Technical University. Her mother was a housewife and devoted herself to her daughter. Sylva Šantavá attended piano lessons with Hugo Haas’s brother, Pavel Haas, who lived next door. She recalls how one day she came to class and all the Jewish children were gone - relegated to the Jewish school. She never saw them again. Later, Pavel Haas also went to a transport from which he never returned. When Sylva was in the octave, the Germans closed the gymnasiums and she was forcibly deployed. Her mother got her a job as a tram conductor. She spent the end of the war with her mother outside Brno in the village of Rozdrojovice, from where she crawled through a ditch back to her house in the centre of Brno. She studied mathematics, which she liked very much, and was active in sports - skiing and playing tennis. During her student years she also met her future husband, with whom she had two children - a daughter and a son. After graduating from college, she stayed on as a teacher. In 1966, she became the first Czechoslovak associate professor of mathematics, and is fondly remembered by students for her teaching methods and ample time for individual work. In 2022, she lived with her daughter in Brno, in the house her father had built.
