My father and I escaped from Terezín hidden in a wagon with furniture.
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Yvonne Sieberová, née Krafft, was born on 4 February 1938. Half her ancestors (on her father’s side) were Jewish. After the Munich Agreement, she and her mother Edith Krafft left Ústí nad Labem for Carpathian Ruthenia to stay with the mother’s parents. Her father Otto Kraft subsequently bought an apartment in Prague where they reunited with him after six months. The father was a chemist, but in Prague he was only allowed to work in the former Jewish synagogue that served as a warehouse for looted Jewish furniture. A Nazi soldier kicked them out of their Prague apartment in 1941. They lived with their uncle, but his family had to leave for the Terezín ghetto. In early 1945, the witness’s father also had to go there, and she followed a few weeks later. Yvonne Sieber remembers the Terezín ghetto only in fragments. She recalls that during her stay in the ghetto she gained two kilos in weight. The only thing she liked was the sour white sauce there. After the end of the war, she left the ghetto secretly together with her father in a furniture truck. Her father converted to the Christian faith after the war. Shortly thereafter, they moved to Litvínov, where the father joined the chemical plants. In Litvínov, she married Jiří Sieber and they raised daughter Michaela. The witness worked first in the local chemical plant, then in medical laboratories in Most and Litvínov. She retired in 1994. She was living in Litvínov in February 2025.
