KS3 / KS4 / GCSE History: World War Two - Escaping from Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia

Trude Silman:
I’m back in my school days about 1938,

I have a wonderful photograph, a class photograph of all of us here.

It’s something which is a great pleasure to look at, but also extremely sad. Because unfortunately, the Germans killed many, many children. One and a half million innocent children were killed during the Holocaust.

Why should innocent people, just because they were Jewish, be killed for no reason at all?

And I look at these faces, I don’t know who survived and who didn’t. I only know that I survived.

We had this radio in our dining room, and Father was oftenbut when he had the news on, you could hear this shouting,and that of course was the typical Hitler speechmaking.

Everybody was aware of this knock at the door and it always came during the night,when they came to take away people, either to take them to prison or to beat them up or whatever, and that fear was there all the time I was at home.

You feel insecure, you don’t feel at ease. You can’t relax and you know that something is wrong.

Germans didn’t come into Czechoslovakia until the 15th March 1939.

And I realised that my parents were wanting to get the children away to safety.

And my turn came, I left home on the 28th March 1939.

The only thing I really remember is getting into a taxi.

I remember my mother and my father and my brother standing near me.

But I cannot remember saying goodbye to them, I can’t rememberwhether I hugged them, kissed them, whether Icried. I have absolutely no recollection whatsoever.

We were travelling by train, through to London.But I end up in Wallsend on Tyne, where a very kind family had offered to give me a home.

I start getting homesick and I start feeling very very poorly.

Because a) I was missing my parents

b) I didn’t speak one word of English.

The food was totally different. I’d never eaten toast, porridge, kippers, marmalade, all these normal English things .

And I just basically cried for as long as I stayed with them.

From the age of 9, in those four years, in those war years, I lived with so many different people.

I mean, I would think I must have been at least through 15 – 20 different places.

I never saw my parents after the 28th March 1939.

Father, he was transported on the 19th of April 1942, and he was already dead by the 8th of May.My Mother, is a different story altogether. The last proper evidence I have that she was alive, was when she was transported to a small concentration transportation camp near Bratislava called Siered.

And I’ve been working for years and years to try and trace her. AndI am almost at the end of the trail. I received some evidencefrom a testimony given by somebody in 1962,who could have been on the same transport that my mother was taken on and on a Death Marchon which she would have been shot and killed.

'The impact on me is something which has never left me. Every single day I rue the destruction of my family. To me, family is the most important building brick for human beings and that's why I find it so hard today.