Hanna Ramras - January 26, 2008
Fate of Mother
Let me take you back again to the middle of the war. So, you had no--there was no knowledge of what...
No, the shock only came when I was in Manchester uh, and when--I remember General Montgomery that was the, the British general and who was there, Patton?
Patton.
And there were others...
Eisenhower.
Eisenhower, of course. He was a top man and they opened the gates of the, of the concentration camps ???...
The British, the British opened Bergen-Belsen.
And then we saw these, these documentary films and that was horrible.
And during the war were you thinking or wondering about what your mother was doing? I mean, you weren't hearing anything from her.
You know, for the first--once the war broke out even when I was already in boarding school the mail system stopped and there messages that we received and we could send through the Red Cross. I could write twenty five words just to show my mother and my grandfather that I was fine and that I was happy and that I hoped they were all right--twenty five words. And I received back twenty five words.
From Theresienstadt.
No, Theresienstadt came later--from Aussig.
Aussig, Aussig. Did you receive mail from Theresienstadt?
No.
Do you think she might have been sent to Auschwitz from Theresienstadt?
Possibly, possibly. But, you know, I often thought that she didn't have a living chance because she was not a fighter. She was very weak after my father died. In those days women were very dependent on their husbands. They didn't have a trade, they didn't have a profession. It was a different world and she was--I think she was very--she must've gone into a depression. If she couldn't take care of me it was either through health or lack of it and through lack of funds--the widow's pension and then I don't know if that continued to come in, in Sudetenland to a person like that.
Do you think she, she managed to raise the money to--it was fifty pounds per child in order, in order to get a child to England because they needed what they were calling the repatriation funds.
She may have--not she--my grandfather.
Your grandfather.
My grandfather, my grandfather is the man with the connections.
And then...
She went back to her father from Bra...from Bratislava.
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