This photograph is probably from 1941, when we had already been forced to move from our original apartment to the outskirts of Pardubice.
Our new dwelling was this little one-story house that belonged to this small businessman, the file-maker Mr. Lochmann, who along with an employee manufactured files there. Mr. Lochmann was a very decent, older person. When I used to play in the garden, I would occasionally run into the workshop after him and watch him grinding and making files. In Mr. Lochmann's house our family lived in two rooms - one room and a kitchen - we were quite crammed in that apartment, we had no conveniences. They were of course different living conditions than what we had been used to before, but I very much liked it in the new apartment, because there was a garden there, into which we could at least sometimes go when the owner permitted it. So my sister and I could occasionally go outside and play with the rabbits that we used to keep there, although Jews weren't allowed to keep any animals. I don't recall that anyone shunned us because we were a Jewish family, for example a little girl from the neighborhood, non-Jewish (on the far right in the photograph), used to normally come and play with us in the garden.
I'm sitting in the middle and am holding one of our rabbits, my sister Lenka is sitting beside me, on the right, and standing above us is my father (Karel Chaim Werner). An interesting thing is that he's already got a yellow star on his lapel. At that time he had already lost his job at the Kudrnac company, and he had to go do manual labor in Pardubice - he and the other Jews swept streets, cleaned sewers and streams.
