Address: GORAZDOVA 335/14, PRAGUE 2
BORN 1896
DEPORTED 1943 TO TEREZÍN
1944 TO AUSCHWITZ
Liberated
From family memories
In the house behind us the husband and wife Božena and Antonín Neumann lived with their two daughters – the elder Eva and the younger Jiřina. The whole family was taken away to the concentration camp in Terezín, although not all at once. Antonín and Božena were interrogated and imprisoned by the Gestapo. Eva and Jiřina then left for Terezín in a transport alone (they also had to pack for their parents, because they were going there straight from prison). In Terezín they reunited. They spent a long year and a half in Terezín, and then – again not together – were sent to the extermination camp in Auschwitz.
Božena, Jiřina and Eva arrived at the Auschwitz ramp together and went to meet Dr. Mengele. Eva, then exactly eighteen years old, remembered that she had a Russian textbook with her. It dawned on her that if the textbook was found with her, it might be held against her. So she ran back to the train and threw the textbook into one of the carriages. Meanwhile, Božena and Jiřina – she was fifteen at the time – arrived at the sorting committee. It sent them to the opposite side than Eva a little later. Grandma Eva never saw her mother and her sister again. Her father also got to Auschwitz, but only at the very end of the death camp’s operation. Despite his congenital heart defect and thanks to his medical profession, he survived – he was assigned to work in a camp hospital.