I remember the day they came. I remember the day I...I remember
the place, the street where I stood, and it was snowing. It was a
cold day and they were pulling in. I was by myself. I just walked
there. It was not far, maybe three-quarters of a mile from where we
lived, and we were uh uh watching them on their wagons with their
tanks, with their half-trucks, with guns pointing to the rooftops.
And it was snowing. And we knew that the screw is going to become
tighter and tighter. Uh we knew what was happening in Austria but
somehow we still had some foolish idea, we are in Czechoslovakia,
because I remember so clearly when I was about eleven or twelve, I
read a book about the Marranos. These were the uh Jews in Spain who
during the Inquisition had a choice either to give up their
religion or be converted to Catholicism, and many of them became
converted only in a name, and still celebrated secretly all the
Jewish holidays. And uh this was a very interesting story about the
Inquisitor, et cetera. And I remember--you know, the kind of
vignettes one remember from childhood--and I remember telling my
grandmother, "Aren't we fortunate that we live in the twentieth
century in Czechoslovakia, that such a thing cannot happen to us."