Hugo Marom - February 8, 2008
Assistance from Non-Jewish Friends II
What is this part of it?
It's the microphone.
Oh, okay. Yes, so uh, when we answered and I also have these letters because when my...when these letters arrived Tonda ??? would on a number of occasions take the train to Poland, go to the fence of this camp where my mother was a cook. She apparently...I don't know exact details...she was a cook in an adjacent prisoner of war...Russian prisoner of war camp and she could go to the fence and he found out where she was and he would bring our letters to her and he...and she would write letters on very thin air mail paper...in fact, somebody checked out when we came back, some of this was rice paper so that if they caught Tonda ??? on the train with...he could actually eat this paper. And he took this risk a number of times...in fact, in fact, after the war when I came back and we met, I had planned to ask him if there had been a love affair between, between Tonda ??? who was at least fifteen years younger than my mother I think...ten to fifteen years younger...and I never got around to asking him before passed away at the age of eighty five or something like that. So, I can't tell you but the type of risks that he took are way beyond anything that you can imagine. In fact, when we came back from England in 1945 and we found people living...Jewish people who...I don't know whether you know what happened after the war. The Germans of course left the apartments where they...which they had taken from the Jews. They ran away immediately to Austria, to Germany and so forth. They disappeared. They were not chased out, they left on their own when they saw what was happening, A., because of the Russians and secondly because of the Czechs. So I came back and I found two women living in my apartment...in our apartment who had come back from concentration camps so I had no intention of...and there was no, no request on their part to say, "Come and live with us, you know, the two of us." So Tonda immediately said, "You come and live in your apartment in...outside of town in this villa." So, we came to live with, with them and we were there until just after Rudy, my brother, left for the United States. And then I decided that out of the five room...these two women and their son were living in four rooms...so I said, "I am going to get one room back and I will live in Brno," because I wanted to study at the university engineering and uh, so I went back to the apartment. The answer to...the total answer...these were my parents' best friends.
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