In 1938, Hana was a 13-year old girl living in Prague. She had a cozy childhood with her younger brother and her parents. Her father owned a children’s clothing store right on the Main Square and both sets of her grandparents lived in Kolín, a small town just an hour train ride away. During the days she went to school and by the time she was a teenager, she was fluent in French, German and her native Czech. She loved to read and spend time with her friends. When she wasn’t in school or with her family, she was dedicated to her Zionist Youth Group; the friends involved referred to themselves as the chaverim (which means friends in Hebrew). They would attend summer camp together and learn how to be pioneers, practicing stuffing mattresses and pillows with straw and using just one pot for all of their cooking and cleaning. They daydreamed of one day traveling to Palestine and helping create kibbutzim.

But in 1939, the world was becoming an increasingly scary place, especially for the Jewish people. Hitler, who was elected six years before in neighboring Germany was changing everything for the people of Europe. He was occupying land and dissolving governments and anti-semitism was growing, dramatically shifting from prejudice to discrimination to persecution. For a long time, the people of Czechoslovakia believed that it would never happen there. They believed that because their government was a democracy and because they valued arts and education and were a fairly secular society, that they would be protected. But, as history has shown, that was not true. In March of 1939, Hitler and his army marched into Czechoslovakia and Hana’s happy life disappeared; the war hadn’t even begun. Her school was shut down and stores began putting up signs saying that Jews were not allowed. Ration cards were given and groceries which were once so normal to buy, became impossible to find. Jewish families were moved into ghettos and forced to live in small quarters with one another. No one at that time could imagine what would come next.

But, Hana was one of the lucky ones. In 1939, when she was 14, she received permission to leave Czechoslovakia; it was like winning the lottery. Her and many of the chaverim would be sent to Denmark, a country that was not yet occupied. The Danish government agreed to take in the teens so they could continue learning their pioneering skills which they were so dedicated to practicing. In October of 1939, she stood on the platform of Prague’s Main Train Station and kissed her parents and younger brother goodbye. She did not know it then, but she would never see them again.

Hana and her fellow chaverim were placed on foster farms. Some lived close together and some lived far apart. While Hana was lonely in her life, adjusting from being part of a warm household to being a servant to a family with whom she shared no language, she understood how lucky she was.

In April of 1940, Denmark too was occupied, but unlike when the Nazis overtook Czechoslovakia, not much changed in Denmark. Parlty because of the Danes Aryan looks and the importance of their food production for the Nazi army, they were spared the fate of so many other European countries. In addition, King Christian X of Denmark declared that all people in his country would be treated the same, regardless of their identity. The ethics of their society prevailed even under occupation.

For three years, Hana moved from foster farm to foster farm. Her dream of sailing to Palestine soon vanished and reality set in; borders everywhere were closing and rumors of concentration camps were coming to the surface. In 1942, Hana decided she must have more of an education, so she began writing to schools asking if in exchange for work, she could attend classes. One school in Sorø, Denmark agreed. It was a finishing school which meant that it was intended for girls from rich families who wanted to learn how to keep a proper household. Every morning, Hana would wake up at 5 A.M. to clean and by 8 A.M. was sitting in the classroom.

After she graduated, a teacher set her up to work as a servant with a bankers family. It was now 1943. World War II was raging and the letters from back home stopped coming. Millions of people were being killed, including Hana’s parents and brother.

By the fall of 1943, Hitler decided that it was time to deport Denmark’s Jews, who up until this time felt little fear of persecution in comparison to Jews from other European countries. But, that plan was leaked to the resistance movement and in a spontaneous act of human decency, the Danes worked together, with cooperation from Sweden (who claimed neutrality throughout the war) to save 95% of the Jewish population. In the matter of a couple weeks in early October, over 7,000 Jews and members of the Danish resistance escaped across the Baltic Sea to Sweden.

Hana was on one of the last boats that left and shared this part of her survival story with the acting chief rabbi of Denmark, Marcus Melchior, who was escaping with his wife and children. The boat became lost at sea as it was navigated by a fisherman who had never sailed far from the coast before. For 19 hours, the refugees hid underneath herring with a paralyzing fear that would either drown or be caught and killed. It was by sheer luck that they found themselves on the safe shores of Sweden.

Once in Sweden, Hana found herself again in a new country, with no knowledge of the language, no money and no contacts. So, as she had done in Denmark, she wrote to schools asking if in exchange for cleaning, could she attain an education. A nursing school in the north of Sweden agreed. She remained in Sweden, creating a new life for herself, until the end of the war in 1945.

Once the war ended, Hana found herself as a displaced person and a stateless person. She went back to Denmark in hopes of receiving Danish citizenship, but when that was not possible, she decided to return to Czechoslovakia to see who of her family survived. She found a few aunts and cousins alive, but learned that her parents and brother were murdered in the Final Solution, the Nazis efforts to eradicate the Jewish people. The horrors of the Holocaust were just being uncovered and Hana had to accept that she was the only one who survived. She learned that her family was first deported to Theresienstadt, a concentration camp outside of Prague and then to Sobibór, an extermination camp in occupied-Poland. She would never know if they were killed in a gas chamber or shot upon arrival, but hoped that they died along the way so they didn’t have to face repeated horrors.

Hana stayed in Prague for nearly seven months and studied Scandinavian languages and culture at Charles University before returning to Denmark and then moving back north to Sweden. She knew Czechoslovakia would never again be her home.

Back in 1939, Hana’s father, like many Jews, sought a way out of Europe for his family. Perhaps they would go to Uganda, he and his wife thought, as it was being considered as a Zionist state, or they would go to to America. He had written to a very distant relative, a step-sister of a grandmother, who lived in Cincinnati, Ohio in hopes of receiving an affidavit so his family could immigrate. But, at that time America, like so many other countries, closed its borders to those seeking refuge. It wasn’t until the Displaced Persons Act of 1948 was passed that Hana received permission to go to America. She was accepted under a quota for Czech exiles living in Sweden.

Prior to leaving for America, she lived in Stockholm and made a nice life for herself. She was now an adult and had the freedom to enjoy arts and culture, to make friends and begin dating. She worked at a company known as the AGA which was started by Herr Nobel, the inventor of dynamite and the man whom the prestigious Nobel Prize is named after. She worked as an assistant for the engineers and was in charge of running a mimeo machine. While there, she befriended a man named Mosley who was an exchange student from Frankfort, Kentucky. He was the first black man she ever met. She helped teach him Swedish and knowing she would go to America soon, he helped teach her English. She left for America in 1950 and promised to bring gifts for his family as she would live in Cincinnati which is where some of his family resided.

In November of 1950, Hana, along with many other emigrants, boarded a boat in England and left for America, leaving behind the all that she knew and all that she lost. She arrived to the United States just around the Thanksgiving holiday. Her knowledge of the English language was limited and she was blind to the type of prejudices and culture that existed in America. The idea of racism was foreign to her. So, when she told her very distant relatives that she would bring gifts to a black family, she couldn’t understand why they were so against the idea. Hana persisted when they told her not to meet them and eventually they agreed to send their son, Joe, with her as a chaperone.

She met Mosley’s relative in Cincinnati’s main square where she was greeted with warmth. When he asked if she would like to come to dinner at his family’s house as a thank you, she was excited to accept the offer. But, Joe exploded on her and told her she wasn’t allowed to go to a home in the black neighborhood. She said that she would go and that he could not tell her what she could and could not do. Then, right there on the city square, Joe slapped her. It was the first time in her life that someone inflicted physical pain upon her. Even during all of her years running from war and escaping deportation, she never was physically hurt by anyone. Hana, standing her ground, still accepted the offer to go to dinner and left Joe to go be with Mosley’s family.

At the end of the night, when she arrived back at the home of her distant relatives, she found all of her belongings packed outside with a letter that read “We do not harbor N***** lovers.” She wished that she could sail back to Sweden.

That night she slept on a park bench and the next day she found a bed in a group home which she shared with another young woman for $5 a night. As she had done in Denmark and in Sweden, she made a life for herself. Over time her English improved and she saved enough money to take the train to San Francisco, a place she had learned about as a child and always wanted to visit.

A year later she married a man by the name of Ralph who was a German Jewish immigrant and was married in a rabbi’s study in New York City. Four years after that, in 1956, she received American citizenship and for the first time in 17 years was a citizen of a country.

Hana had three children with Ralph. They first lived in Flushing, Queens in New York City. Then they moved to Baltimore for a short period of time before settling in a suburb outside of Philadelphia. Ralph and Hana divorced in the 1970s and she remarried in the late 1980s to a man she met in Denmark after the war. His named was Bernd and he moved to be with her in America. Together they were the grandparents for seven grandchildren.

Hana passed away in 2010 at the age of 85.