Helga Smékalová

* 1930

  • “I suffered terribly. I really liked going to school, and I liked being with other children, classmates and the such. I really enjoyed learning. I would come home and say: ‘Mum, why doesn’t the teacher choose me to answer? I raise my hand and he always picks the children who don’t know it, instead of choosing me.’ Mum explained me that the teacher has to pick all the children. When I was kicked out of school at the beginning of the fourth year, then nowadays we would say I fell into depression. I suffered terribly at the time. And I also started being frightened of going out. Soon after we began wearing the star, and one time German children chased me around the town. So from that time I was afraid of going out.”

  • “When Mum married, she converted to the Jewish faith. They thought they’d save me somehow by doing it, so in thirty-nine they had me baptised, and they both converted to Catholicism. Except it didn’t help. Looking back, I say it wasn’t a good idea, because they took me away from one group of children, and I never fell in with the second group, you could say.”

  • “I had my satchel, which contained a handkerchief and a slice of bread, and I went to Prague to a villa in Střešovice. They registered us there, but then they sent us off to Hagibor. There were wooden houses there, and we were supposed to stay there until the February transport to Terezín. I didn’t even have spare panties with me because we had reckoned that I was going for just the one day and that I would be back home by evening, like Mum. It was an awful shock for me.”

  • “Grandmother’s flat had its windows looking out into the street, so my parents were badly shaken when the Germans did their marching parades. We lived in Štefánikova Street, what’s now May Day Street, and that was one of the main thoroughfares of Olomouc. They held a big marching parade there. I can’t remember exactly when it was, but I know that we watched it happen and that my parents were badly shaken by it.”

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I wasn’t living, I was surviving

Helga Smékalová (Deutschová)
Helga Smékalová (Deutschová)
zdroj: archiv pamětnice

Helga Smékalová, née Deutschová, was born on 28 October 1930 in Olomouc as the only child of a mixed marriage. Her mother was Czech and her father was of Jewish descent. The family lived with Helga‘s grandmother Helena Deutschová in a house in Olomouc on what is now 1. máje (May Day) Street. During World War II in the summer of 1942, while being transported to Minsk, her grandmother was murdered near the city of Baranovichi. Her father died in hospital in April 1945. From September 1940 the witness was banned from attending school because of her mixed descent, and she thus spent the following years hiding at home. She only rarely left the house, and her only pastime was the reading of books. In February 1945 she was placed on a transport to Terezín. She came home after the end of the war. In September 1948 she married Jaroslav Smékal. Their only daughter Radka emigrated to Australia after the Warsaw Pact invasion of 1968. Helga Smékalová still lives in Olomouc.