Alena Munkova on summer vacation in Komarov

This is summer vacation in Komarov, by Horovice. Here I'm on a pod, whose name I don't know, that was near Komarov. We used to go there often. I had been sent to Komarov for summer vacation to the parents of the girl third from the left, who was named Olga Konopaskova. The others are some children, I don't even know who the boy who was rowing us around was.

I'm in the boat, in the middle. I was around 14 then, sometime during 1940. That girl's parents lived right in Komarov. That lady had a sister who was married to some Dr. Koliner, a skin doctor in Prague, who was a friend of my father's. So they arranged to send me there for summer vacation. It's an amateur photograph, apparently taken by another friend from Komarov.

Besides trips to Kluky to visit my second mother's parents, I also used to go to a guesthouse during the summer holidays, which was in Doksy. I was supposed to learn German there, but because it was all Czech children there, besides the German teachers, we spoke only Czech. It was by Mach's Lake, so I've got beautiful memories of Mach's Lake, where at the age of nine, when I was there, I probably learned to swim a bit, but I don't exactly know any more.

One summer vacation, I might have been nine, ten or perhaps eleven, we were in a different guesthouse, in Nadejkov, which is in southern Bohemia, whose owners were relatives of my first mother, by the name of Seger. They had a farm in Nadejkov, and during the summer there was some sort of camp set up there, where my brother and I were invited. Mrs. Segerova was probably my mother's cousin. They had two sons, one was older by about two years and the other by about four, one was named Milan and they called the second one Hansi, as he was named Jan.

I met Milan after the war during one reunion of children from Terezin. We were both amazed that we had survived. At that time he was already living in Israel, where he married Eva Diamantova, whom I remember from Terezin.