Vera Gissing - April 22, 2006
Receiving a Diary II
Did Eva write too?
And Eva did the same, yes. And, you know, we went together. She was on the other side of England--we saw each other on holiday. She was in a posh school. I was in a very poor family but with a very good heart--a Christian family. But again, they made me feel at home. They accepted that I was Jewish. They didn't force me to go to church. But they said it would be nice if I went. And I thought, "Well, there's only one God. Where...wherever I am I will pray for my fam...my dear parents as I did every night." And uh, I--it um, and really it was my parents who gave me this wonderful gift of all the records of those years, which were now on paper. And the diaries--they were meant for them, for them alone. And I felt--after I found out that father was shot on a death--in a--on a death march in December 1944, you know, that my mother had perished of typhus and all the rest of it and about the rest of the family. I put all the diaries in a box and I felt I could never bear to open them again because they were meant for my parents and my parents alone. And it wasn't 'til uh, after I came back to England--because I went back to Prague at the end of the war, and I was there for three and a half years, and I studied at uh, Prague University. I took English and literature.
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