大象传媒

I was born on the 7th May 1945, the last day of the War.

My mother was English but my father was a doctor from what was then Czechoslovakia. He managed to get out of occupied Prague in 1938 and went to Paris where he worked as a doctor for the army and joined the resistance. He left Paris as the Germans were entering it and caught a ship in Calais bound for Africa.

The ship was unable to get through because of the fighting and after three weeks they docked at Liverpool. My father came to London where he worked as a surgeon for the NHS and met my mother.

As soon as the war was over, my father returned to Czechoslovakia to help the people coming out of the concentration camps and to look for his family and friends.

The following are excerpts from letters he wrote to my mother from Czechoslovakia:

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Frantisek Popper

Prague

Extracts from letter: 10-6-45

On our arrival in Pilsen we met for the first time wrecks of former human beings from Buchenwald. Ash grey skeletons with horror stricken eyes, boys with faces of old men, who cannot smile, shaky or apathetic, demoralized. Those who had some energy left, begged and struggled for food. We gave them all the food we had.

Here in Prague I have met a number of survivors, relatively a few in number, who have put on weight in the meantime and look sunburnt; so judging from their external appearance, one might think it was not so bad after all.

Every day I am invited by some of these survivors, usually only remainders of large families, and what I have heard with my own ears from these victims and eyewitnesses goes far beyond imagination and description. Five to seven million human creatures (there is no means yet to count, because the Nazis destroyed all evidence, registers and even ashes) have been destroyed by all means of physical and mental torture, which include vivisection, burning and burning alive, starvation, exposure to cold and heat, hanging, shooting, beating to death, gassing (which was apparently the most humane way of killing), mutilation and humiliation. No mother was allowed to feed her baby, these were starved. All children were killed, small ones simply smashed, older ones gassed. The mothers in most cases preferred to go to death with their children.

The survivors are those who escaped through some miracle, or who worked for 12 hours a day in factories with hardly any food. Others survived when the gas chambers in Teresien could not be finished in time. About 25,000 were saved when the Red Army, the English and Americans overran the camps before the Nazis could finish their work of extermination. I write all these things, which are only a small fraction of what I hear every day, not in order to frighten you, but so that you should tell everyone who does not know, or who does not want to know about these established facts. I know from my experience it is hard to believe all that. What strikes me most is the complete indifference people have acquired. They report the loss of nearest relatives with no more emotion than the loss of a sixpence, people who in normal times were upset over a pimple. It is a sort of self-protection.

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Frantisek Popper

Prague

Extracts from letter: 13-6-45

I hear every day the same stories, mostly from single survivors of former large families. The children have almost all gone. So far no trace of my parents. My favorite Uncle and his wife were arrested because his name was found on a list of contributors for victims of Nazi persecution. He wife was set free and has disappeared and he was executed. My favorite cousin Paul Konig died of starvation and T.B. in Teresien. My cousin Frite Wermuth died through exhaustion and torture in one of the worst concentration camps only this year in February. The wife and child of his brother were gassed. I have heard from several sources that the Gestapo were searching for me after I had left, and that they took two friends of mine, the Fleischer brothers, both doctors, as hostages instead. Both were killed in Dachau. Prof Kraus, whom I was going to help, has committed suicide. His wife and five children disappeared.

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After five months my mother, sister and I joined my father in Prague. We lived there until 1949 when my father had to leave again because of harassment by the Communist regime. We returned to London and my father continued to work for the NHS until his death in 1968. My father always remained grateful to Britain for having taken him in, and was committed to working for the NHS.

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