Zosza the cook recognised us

During World War 2, a former monastery in Lodž was transformed into a collection camp for children designated for re-education by the Nazis. One of them was Václav Zelenka from Lidice. In 1972 he and his friends returned to the place where they had spent part of their war-time childhood. It was not hard for them to find the monastery. But their joy was greater when they found their old cook, Zosza. “Zosza stood there like a phantom image,” Václav Zelenka remembers years later. “She had been in the collection camp in Sporná Street as a forced labourer. She never expected to see us ever again, she was lost for words. She just kept repeating that we were her children... ‘You, Wacusza. And where is Wenclik?’ she said asking about another child, Václav Hanf.” The former cook gradually remembered all the children. And that is more important than might be imagined. When the war ended, a great search was conducted for the children the Nazis had taken from their parents. The children were returned to Czechoslovakia, but in some cases it was later discovered it was a mistake. It is thus not surprising that deep down, some of them, including Václav Zelenka, sometimes doubt if they are truly the children people claim them to be. They themselves remember nothing of their original home, they had been so young at the time. It was thanks to Zosza that it was confirmed that those who visited her really were the Lidice children.