The wedding of Alice Klimova and Robert Klima

I met my future husband, Robert Klima, four days before my departure from England. He was also a Jew, and along with his brother had emigrated via Poland. In November 1941 he joined the Czechoslovak army and when the war ended, he returned to the islands; they'd gotten a week's holidays to take core of personal matters. I knew his sister, at that time she had a ten-month-old baby and the two of us met at her place. For me it was love at first sight, but he had some Englishwoman. He wanted to talk her into going to Czechoslovakia with him, but she didn't want to go. We didn't meet again until we were in Prague.

We were married in April 1948 at the Clam-Gallas Palace on Old Town Square. The lady who's hiding behind my husband was my witness; she was a friend of my parents', and it's probably thanks to her and her husband that my sister and I got to England before the war. It was they who were persuading my parents to send us there. They themselves had no children, and so after the war, when our parents didn't return, we sort of became their surrogate children.