Ing. Petr Daniel

"Sometimes it happens, and even today it happens to me, that a friend asks me if I'm really Jewish, as if he can't believe it. When I confirm it, he looks at me like I'm a sleigh in summer. I don't know — as if he wanted to touch me, like people touch a hunchback for luck or something. That's just the feeling I get, but it’s only my impression. Some of my friends say I'm overly sensitive about these things and that I shouldn’t take it so personally, but that's just how I am."

"When the Germans decided to move it, apparently to Auschwitz, she managed to escape during the move. She escaped, hid in the woods, and then - she was about 18 years old at the time, and apparently, she caught the eye of a Polish man who was doing some surveying work there, and she ended up with him. She lived with him under false or borrowed papers for the entire duration of the war. She even had a child with him, but the baby died shortly after birth. She had herself baptized by him so that the child would be legitimate. The baby died anyway, but my mother – perhaps to shield us from her own experience – later had all of us baptized after the war, or rather, when we were born after the war. But over time, I came to understand how things really were, what the history was and who I was, so I eventually decided to leave Christianity — I formally left the church and today I’m not affiliated with any religion, so to speak."