Anna Kopska

This is Mrs. Kopska, our cook.

The photo was taken sometime during the 1930s and I think that it wasn't somewhere in Prague, but somewhere out in the country.

Mrs. Kopska, the same as my family, from the Caslava area, when she was young she already worked as a servant for my grandfather, Alois Brod.

Mrs. Kopska helped us a lot during the war. Because she was a Christian, she could under her name rent an apartment in which we then also lived, we didn't have to crowd together with several other families in the ghetto in the Old Town.

When we were deported to Terezin, it was again she who helped us out by sending us packages of food.

Just finding the food wasn't simple, and then a person wanted to send a package and there was some anti-Semitic clerk sitting there at the post office, he would right away look at him suspiciously...

I'm also indebted to Mrs. Kopska that she saved our family property that we had hidden with her, for example these photographs.

After the war, when I returned to Prague, she was the first person that I went to see.

Together we then lived on in our apartment on Masna Street, after a few years my wife came along, and then also our daughter, in fact at one time there were five of us there crowded together, that's because Mrs. Kopska had a son, who lived with us for a while.

Otherwise Mrs. Kopska was a widow and lived on a widow's pension.