Ernest Drucker was born in August 1922 in Brno. He grew up in a family of construction company owner, and was a member of the youth Zionist organization Maccabi Hatzair, led by his father. He studied at the Brno Technical University.
Immediately after the occupation, he and his parents attempted to flee the country, without success. When they returned from the border, the Gestapo was waiting for them at their house. Someone denounced them for trying to escape. The construction company was confiscated, the father was arrested. Ernest, after being warned by his friend Vlasta, a member of the Czechoslovak resistance, left Brno and with the help of her contacts was taken across the border to Slovakia. There, a resistance group provided him with false documents in the name of Arnošt Tláčik (a translation of his name into Slovak) and sent him as an escort with a shipment of breeding bulls to Italy.
In Trieste, according to the Resistance's instructions, he reported to the British consul and enlisted in the British army. He was to have joined the service in Alexandria, but was sent to Haifa to complete his studies and thus be more useful to the army. He learned English and Hebrew, and entered army service in April 1942. He was deployed to the fighting at Tobruk.
After the war, he joined the Israeli War of Independence as an officer in the Czechoslovak army. He opened an architectural office in the town of Rehovot. In 1953, he moved to Canada.
The interview was filmed on July 2, 1996 in North York, Ontario, Canada.
Ilsa Maier was born in 1922 in Brno as Ilsa Drexler. She had a happy childhood until the age of 17, when on August 15, 1939 the Nazis attacked the Jews in Esplanade café and killed her father. She studied at the Brno Jewish Reform Gymnasium, then worked in a Jewish kindergarten. At the end of 1941, however, she and her mother had to report for one of the first transports to the Terezín ghetto.
In the ghetto, she worked as a nurse with infants and later became a teacher of preschool children. When her then-husband, whom she married just before leaving for Terezín, was called to a transport bound for the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in 1944, Ilsa volunteered to go with him. After a few weeks, she was deported from Birkenau to the camp in Bad Kudowa, a branch of Gross Rosen. She was liberated in the Sackisch camp.
After the war, Ilsa was reunited with her mother and grandmother; her husband had been murdered in Dachau. She began to study and became close to her husband's friend Francis Maier, whom she eventually married. The whole family took advantage of her uncle's invitation and traveled to the USA in 1947. The February 1948 communist coup resolved the question of whether they should stay in America or return.
After the fall of the communist regime, Ilsa often returned to her old homeland, especially to visit her cousin living in Brno, with whom she had lived through the horrors of the concentration camps.
The interview was filmed on June 1, 1995 in Encino, California, USA.
The owner of the Esplanade Café, Alois Strompf, was deported to the Terezín ghetto on transport U. The co-owner Vítězslav Strompf and the co-owner Irma Strompf were deported from Brno on transport K. From Terezín they were all further deported to the Warsaw ghetto, where their trace is lost. They were probably murdered in the Treblinka death camp.