All the bells were ringing
Until the outbreak of the war, Anna Kopsová and her siblings led a quite ordinary teenage life. However, the war completely changed the life of the mixed Czech-Jewish family. Anna has very fond memories of how her older sister helped her to get her first part-time job at the Prague Castle. She was selling tickets to the Ethnographic Exhibition in the Vladislav Hall. Even the president's son, Jan Masaryk, would come to this exhibition. When the first Czechoslovak president Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk died on September 14, 1937, his bodily remains were exposed in the Vladislav Hall of the Prague Castle. Thousands of people came to say goodbye to the beloved president. Anna Kopsová and her sister Marta were among the first visitors because their uncle Antonín, a former legionary, was a guard of honor at the bier. "We went through the courtyard and all the bells of Prague were ringing for a last time, I had goose bumps", recalls Mrs. Anna today.
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Anna Kopsová, née Ledererová
Anna Kopsová, née Ledererová, was born on 15 March 1922 in Prague into a mixed Czech-Jewish family. After completing town (primary) school he attended the prestigious business academy of the Committee of Prague Merchants, but this was closed when the Nazis arrived, and so Anna was prevented from graduating. Her elder sister helped find a holiday job at Prague Castle before the outbreak of the war, and after that she began working in E. F. Burian's theatre D34. Anna's father was of Jewish origin, and although he relinquished his faith when he married, her parents were forced to formally divorce at the beginning of World War II. The father thus saved his family from being transported to a concentration camp, the fate he himself suffered. In 1942 Anna's father was taken to Terezín, and later to Auschwitz, where he was sent directly from the train to gas chambers. During the war Anna suffered from severe health problems, which helped her avoid forced labour. Her brother Jiří was drafted at sixteen years of age and ended up in labour camp Klettendorf (now Klecina, a district of Wrocław). He managed to escape, but he was arrested in Prague and sent back to Germany, where he fell gravely ill. The hardships of the war caused his premature death. More than thirty of Anna's relatives from her father's side died during World War II.
