Fany Hochstein was born into an Orthodox Jewish family in Košice on June 21, 1915. She married in the 1930s and moved with her husband to Český Těšín.
After the occupation of the city, she fled to Kraków, where she gave birth to a son. When the Nazis established a Jewish ghetto in the town, she fled. She was caught and transported to the ghetto in Bochnia, from where she also escaped. She hid in Prokocim, then the family decided to flee to Hungary, which was still safe for Jews at that time. She made her way to Budapest via Liptovský Svatý Mikuláš and Košice, where she obtained a false Christian identity and false documents.
She settled in Debrecen, but was eventually arrested in the summer of 1944 and interned in the concentration camp in Sárvár. After the deportations from Hungary began, she was deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp, where she survived several selections and lived to see liberation. She returned to Český Těšín and in 1949 she illegally made her way to Vienna, from where she immigrated to Israel.
The interview was filmed on November 14, 1996 in Netanya, Israel.
Alfred Hartmann was born on December 30, 1914. He grew up in Těšín, Poland, where his father owned a wine shop. He went to a German school and later to a Polish trade school. He briefly participated in the activities of the Zionist Hashomer Hatzair movement, but was not interested in politics. He played football for the Czech club SK Těšín, later moving to the Czech side of town.
He was actively involved in helping Jewish refugees from Nazism who were heading west or east through Poland after the occupation of the rest of Czechoslovakia. After the start of World War II, he became a refugee himself, heading for Soviet-occupied Polish territory. He settled in Lwów, married.
Then he was arrested by the Soviet secret police and deported with his wife to Siberia, to Tyumen, where he was put to forced labour, later deported to Omsk. Like thousands of other Czechoslovak prisoners in the Gulag, he was released after the formation of the Czechoslovak army unit in Buzuluk. With this eastern exile army he returned to his homeland and settled in Prague. In the 1950s he was imprisoned again, worked in the uranium mines in Jáchymov.
The interview was recorded on 16 July 1996 in Prague.