Helena Wiplerová

"Always at a time when there were raids and he had to play the accordion, or when they hung somebody and he had to play the accordion - and he saw the horror - then at that time the thoughts came back to him and the panic attacks returned to him and he always locked himself in a room and he locked himself in there with me. And I remember standing there, I had to go. We had that old couch with that pillow under one´s head. You must have seen it in the photos somewhere. There he laid face down and cried. I stood by him from the other side. What will a small child do when they see someone they love? So, they lie down on them. I always laid on his head and dipped my hands into his hair. He had beautiful hair. And now I did one thing, which I later used on patients. I learned to breathe to relieve his suffering. Then we got together in that breath and I remember standing there and thinking of nothing at all. I was verry little and I just breathed with him. That breathing together, it's a wonderfully healing thing for the psyche."

"My uncle was taken away and the family no longer saw him. And then they were moving him from a concentration camp, that's what the Nazis did. So, when he arrived in Mauthausen, where he was basically until the end of the war - in the meantime he went through Buchenwald and whatever else, but the music always saved him. First, he was there where they had to pull the prisoners out of those gas chambers. He couldn't do it at all. It seemed that they would kill him too, because they found him just useless. And then they let him drag some burdens, but eventually they found out that he was a very good musician. And the Germans liked the music. So, they made a music ensemble out of them - out of all those musicians. And of course, he had to play during those drinking parties and during those raids."