Tag #107794 - Interview #101359 (Helena Najberg)

After this quarantine they sent us to Prague. There must have been some meeting point there. We took a train. This trip was in much better conditions than all the previous ones. First of all, we weren’t afraid of getting killed at every step, this was important. I can’t say how many women were there. I remember one of them, because we became friends, her name was Hania. I don’t remember where she came from. Anyway, at the time we weren’t interested in where you came from, but in where you were going. She stayed in Prague, she found a husband there, because her head hadn’t been shaved and she had beautiful hair. The Russians paid for everything, for accommodation, for food and even gave us 50 crowns [Czech currency], so we could buy something for ourselves. These 50 crowns, it was enough to buy some food. So they were very nice to us. They even paid us for trams, for public transport, we didn’t have to pay for that. But in Lodz, when I got back and got on a tram, the driver asked me to pay. I told him: ‘Mister, you can see [the coat], I’m from a concentration camp, how am I supposed to have money?’, ‘So walk on foot.’ And I had to get off the tram, he didn’t let me ride it without a ticket.

We spent several days in Prague. It was then announced that the quarantine was over and that we could go wherever we wanted to. I wanted to go to Lodz. I was hoping to meet someone from my family. It was May 1945. And I thought to myself several years later that it was a shame that I didn’t get on any other train and go anywhere else but to Poland, because I didn’t expect I’d get a welcome like I did. I was shocked when I heard these words [‘Why did Hitler leave so many Jews?’]. From Katowice, because that’s where the first stop was, I went to Lodz and I concluded that there was no point in going there. I didn’t know anyone, I didn’t have a place to sleep.