Knowing that my father did not suffer and that he actually died with dignity was giving me strength
Stáhnout obrázek
Helena Krouská, née Lamplová, was born in September 1921 in a Jewish family in Znojmo. Her father Josef Lampl was a veterinarian and an important member of the Moravian chapter of B‘nai B‘rith. In February 1938, her mother, Anna, died of cancer when she was only 42 years old. In the same year, after the German occupation of Austria, most of her closest relatives were living in the German sphere of influence. After the occupation of the Sudetenland, the rest of the family had to move from Znojmo to Moravské Budějovice. Soon after, her sixteen-year-old brother František left for Palestine in a group of children with an emigrant passport. In April 1942, her father Josef committed suicide in a Gestapo office in a hopeless situation after being interrogated. Helena and her grandparents were deported to the Terezín ghetto soon after. While in Terezín she married MUDr. Jiří Ganz. In October 1944, she left with him in a transport for Auschwitz-Birkenau, and shortly after she continued from there to the labour camp Oederan in Sachsen. She returned to Terezín during an evacuation at the beginning of May 1945. Jiří Ganz succumbed to an injury and serious disease in Dachau. After the war, Helena settled in Prague and she married again, to JUDr. Otakar Krouský. Together they are raising two children from his first marriage and their son Jan. The couple maintain close contacts with people who were against the communist regime.
