Anna Plačková was born on 30 August 1913 in Svitavy, but grew up in Brno. She studied medicine, during the refugee crisis in 1938 she briefly worked with Jewish refugees in Brno. Among the refugees from Austria was her own sister Luisa, married in Vienna. She returned to Austria briefly, but when she and other Viennese Jews were forced to wash the street tiles with their own toothbrushes, she took the opportunity to emigrate to the U.S. under the Polish visa quota, thanks to her husband's birthplace. However, the visa quota for Czechoslovak citizens was exhausted for many years in advance.
Anna had no choice but to look for illegal ways to escape the country. The members of her illegal transport to Palestine first sailed on cruise ships on the Danube, in Romania they switched to a cargo ship hastily adapted to transport migrants.
When a British patrol attempted to stop the vessel, the captain headed for Greek waters, abandoned the ship off the island of Kea and refused to take any further care of the migrants. It was only with the help of the Jewish community in Athens and contacts in London that a modified tugboat was procured, which the refugees transferred to in international waters and eventually reached the port of Haifa, Palestine.
Anna earned her living as a nanny and later married a Czechoslovak army officer in Palestine in Jerusalem. Her husband fought at Tobruk and in Europe, and did not meet Anna until after the war. Upon her return to Czechoslovakia, Anna was confronted with the fact that few of her family survived. She lived in Brno until 1947, after which she and her husband moved to Prague.
The interview was filmed on May 3, 1996 in Prague.