This is the birth certificate of my mother, Ella Wernerova (nee Weissensteinova), who was born on 2nd May 1906 in Nachod. This birth certificate was preserved thanks to the fact that my parents had carefully hidden their documents before the war.
When in 1944 in Auschwitz there was a selection, my father and I were standing in the queue, and my father, who probably sensed that we won't be together, told me what I should do in case I should by chance return home earlier than he. By the way he said it, I know that he hoped that he'd return too, he didn't want to believe that he wouldn't return. He said to me, 'Listen, whoever returns home first, if you get there first, you know where in the shed our tomcat Mourek used to sleep, dig in that corner there, you'll find some things there, OK.’ So that I naturally remembered.
After I returned home, I remembered my father's words, what he had told me before the selection, about the things hidden in the shed. So I dug in the spot that my father had described to me, I thought that I'd find some valuables there. I found a five-liter pickle jar. In the jar were only documents and papers, birth certificates and residence certificates. But I also found a list of things, where it was written what my parents had hidden and with whom. My guardian, a professor from the Pardubice Commerce Academy, got a hold of that list, and reclaimed those things from people. I know that he was very upset, that some didn't want to return them. They however weren't valuables; they were things like for example two easy chairs, underwear that people couldn't return anyways, it was already worn out. I got back books - Goethe, Schiller, Dumas, Capek.
I came by our family photos more or less by chance, because they weren't on the list. But after the war I visited Mr. Lochmann in Pardubice, with whom we had lived after they had moved us out of our apartment. He told me that there was some sort of suitcase up in the attic, that he didn't know what it contained. Either he really never opened it, or he already knew what was in it, I really didn't care. We climbed up into the attic and in that suitcase I found all of our family albums, all of our family photographs.
