(MENAFN- Swissinfo)
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betty brenner bricht ihr schweigen über den holocaust (original) I first met Betty in December 2019 in her home in Zofingen, northern Switzerland, where she has lived for 51 years.“It's a nice little town – I feel at home here,” the 82-year-old says, adding after a short pause:“Well, you have to feel at home somewhere.”
Betty, piercing blue eyes still alert, sits on the sofa in the middle of the living room. Fifty-five years ago she did not want to leave her hometown of Brünn in Czechoslovakia. But when Soviet tanks rolled in to crush the liberalisation movement known as the Prague Spring in August 1968, Betty and her husband felt they had no choice but to leave. Together with their young son Tomas, they headed for Austria.
During the Cold War, Europeans, including the Swiss, showed a great deal of solidarity towards people from the Eastern Bloc.“The Swiss made us feel very welcome,” Betty remembers. If people were interested, she would tell them about their lives under Communist rule and the time when Soviet troops invaded Czechoslovakia. But Betty never talked about the first time she was forced to leave her home. That was in 1944, when she fled to the Vepor Mountains in Slovakia. It was much more traumatic, and a lot more dangerous too.
Would she be willing to speak about it today? Betty is hesitant.
“I'd rather not talk about it,” she says. In the end, however, she agrees to tell her story even though she knows that it will upset her. She has only recently realised what her parents must have gone through and wonders what she would have done in their place.
“The older I get, the more I think about it,” she says.“It still sends a shiver down my spine when I imagine what they had to endure.” But at the time she was too young to understand and sometimes did not know how to react.
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