So in 1953 I transferred to the Hydrodynamics Institute, they had a very good director there, and he had a splendid assistant. The assistant interviewed me, told me that everything was in order, but finally he paused, and to ‘politically verify’ me, he said, ‘Please, Miss, there’s one more thing, but I don’t know how to say it. You see, we don’t have a [Communist] Youth Association here. And if you’re going to require it, we’ll have to start one because of you.’ And I replied, ‘Please, anything but that.’ I think that I was extremely lucky. So at the academy I started up a library, and I was there until 1988, until the last day of November 1988, when I retired. I was in charge of the entire library, so I performed acquisitions, processing, lending, statistics, purchasing plus inter-library loans.
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Displaying 20431 - 20460 of 50826 results
Eva Duskova
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They made Library Science studies into a single major with no minor subject for us, so we graduated in two years, in 1952. During my studies I did my work experience at the National Museum, in the archival documents section, where I used to go work for free in the hopes that I’d get a job there. I found the work there quite fascinating. They then asked our faculty for me, because it was work placement time. But at our faculty they told them that the museum is a very reactionary environment and that I’m not politically somehow yet a completely lost cause, so that they have to put me someplace where I’ll have a chance to become politically elevated. And they placed me at the Army Medical Library in Hradec Kralove. So I wrote them to introduce myself, and they wrote me back that three people had gotten the same placement, and that I was the least suitable as far as political background was concerned, so that they wouldn’t accept me.
Besides languages, I also devoted myself to sports quite a bit, but back then there weren’t any sports clubs. Before the war I used to go to Sokol [19]. But I never participated in any rally. I skied, skated, sledded, swam and so on. In Litomysl people used to go skating on a pond not far from Anita Frankova’s house. So we used to go skating together. I never skied in the mountains; my parents didn’t ski, so we never went. But in Litomysl there was this hill that they used to call Fejtak, or Fejt Hill. Back then it seemed awfully huge to me, but today I maybe wouldn’t even notice it. What’s more, it may not even be there any more, various changes have been made there. And it was on this hill that children in Litomysl used to go skiing. But my only interest was reading, and that’s stayed with me to this day.
After graduating I went on to study Library Science at the Faculty of Philosophy. I had wanted to take psychology, but halfway through my last year of high school I learned that I’d have to combine it with pure philosophy, and back then pure philosophy meant above all Marxism. Well, and so I rejected that notion and applied for Languages – not very cleverly though, because I applied for English-German. For in 1950 it was absolutely out of the question that I’d be accepted, when I didn’t have a Party background. So I was very lucky that back then they wrote me: ‘You have been accepted into Library Science.’ And so I studied Library Science.
As I’ve said, after the war I was also again able to go to school, to high school. That was the school year 1945/46. Back then I was accepted into ‘kvarta’ on a probationary basis – event though I already belonged into ‘kvinta’ [fifth year of school], where they, for understandable reasons, didn’t take me – with the condition that by the end of the school year I had to pass exams in all the subjects in junior high school. Whereas I know that for example here in Prague one of my girlfriends only had to do exams in Czech and math, while I did them in natural sciences, chemistry, and I don’t know what else. In the beginning it was very tough, but then I got used to the work. I used to study late into the night, the kvarta subjects, plus all of the other stuff.
That we’re going to have to move out and that he’s going to put the Communist Party secretariat on the first floor, and a nursery school on the ground floor. Or an absolute analogy, right? Back then we tried as we might to defend ourselves. One of my friends worked at the district government office – back then Litomysl was still a district – and kept an eye open for us. As soon as they were notified that we’d have to move out, she told us about it even before we got the notification. My mother went to see a different friend, a lawyer, and she immediately wrote up an appeal for us. We appealed for so long, that we eventually appealed all the way up to Zapotocky [13]. And with him we were finally successful, so we were able to stay there.
Our family and my mother’s sister’s family lived together in one house, I think that it was a nice house.
Until 1951 my mother lived from her pension – and we lived very modestly, because it was a pension mainly from the time that my father worked as a laborer. It really wasn’t a lot of money. In 1951 she had to find a job, but already back then due to her political background she couldn’t do anything other than manual labor. She worked mainly in the Litomysl dairy, where she washed out large milk cans. She also worked at the post office, where she did some manual work, and also, I think, at a mill and then at Logarex, that was a factory that made various rulers.
And they took me there with her. I don’t know how long she was there, but once again they more or less put her into shape and still during summer vacation she returned to Litomysl, where she began searching for the furniture and things from our house.
On the other hand it bothered me that we had to hand over radios. That we also had to hand over some jewelry, that didn’t really affect me, and I think that my mother gave it all to friends for safekeeping. She couldn’t give it to our housekeeper, because up until out transport she lived with my grandma and grandpa in one apartment. However, when the door closed on my grandma, she took what she could from that apartment and hid it, and after the war she gradually handed it over to us.
It bothered me very much that I couldn’t go to school. Various restrictions, like what we could buy, that I basically didn’t even notice, because our mother was very capable and rustled up all sorts of things. In various illicit ways, and we also knew a lot of people that lived out in the countryside.
And this family – very simple, but of very precious character – used to send my classmate, Bozenka, to our house to play with me. Her parents simply told her, ‘If you were friends with Eva before, you have to be friends with her again.’ And she really did come over to our place, up until we left.
And there we stayed until liberation. However when exactly we were liberated, that’s an example of how memories differ. I was and still am convinced that we were liberated on 6th May 1945 by the American army. My friends, two sisters with whom we had gone there at the same time back then, are convinced that we were liberated on 4th May. But I’m convinced I’m right. And so are they.
We were in Auschwitz for fourteen days. On 28th October we had the feeling that we’d be going into the gas chamber, but we were lucky and we went on to Austria, to a branch of Mauthausen that was named Lenzing [a women’s sub-camp of Mauthausen that provided workers for the textile industry] in Upper Austria.
But when on 23rd June 1944 he died, we immediately left on the earliest transport, the October one, to Auschwitz. We left Terezin on 12th October, and arrived in Auschwitz on 14th October. I remember that we were walking in rows of five and that coming towards us came walking – one of the lucky chances in my life – some German soldier, who told my mother to give him that wedding ring that she had on her finger. So she gave it to him, and in exchange he advised us, ‘Remember, that you’re older than 16 and less than 45, and volunteer for heavy labor.’ My mother had my father’s winter coat with her, so she threw it on me, and when we went in front of Mengele, I looked somewhat huskier.
My mother went to ‘family’ school, where she studied, as one would say, women’s work: cooking, sewing, baking, and basic household economics. Today, such schools have a three-year program, I think. I even have this feeling that at one time they were four-year programs with a diploma. But my mother had a one-year course. Back then it wasn’t a complete high school education. She finished ‘kvarta’ [fourth of eight years of school] and then went to that family school. And then she went to the Sudetenland, to Teplice-Sanov, to study German. There she lived with some family. She never had a job anywhere, she was a housewife.
The deportation of Litomysl Jews took place on 3rd December 1942, first to Pardubice, and on 5th December from Pardubice to Terezin. However, as my father was the president of the Jewish community, they had to somehow shut it all down there, and so he and his immediate family, i.e. my mother and I, stayed in Litomysl for another three days. We didn’t leave for Pardubice until 6th December, and from Pardubice for Terezin on 6th December with people from Pardubice.
At his work my father had the use of a company car, so we made plentiful use of it and used to go on various trips. Not only to Brno, but also to Zamberk and so on, we varied it a lot. Or we’d go on various hiking trips in the immediate region with my father’s friends. On those occasions we’d always go to this special pub and there my parents would order beer and Olomouc ‘stinky’ cheese. But of course we also went and visited historical landmarks. We also traveled abroad, to Crikvenica, Yugoslavia [the town of Crikvenica is located in Croatia today]. That was in 1936. I remember that I learned to swim there – what’s more I was by the sea for the first time – and that I got tonsillitis there.
I think that my father sympathized with the Social Democrats, with the rightist part. He wasn’t a member, but had a very strong social conscience. And he was a member of an association of engineers and architects called the SIA. Otherwise, as far as I know, he wasn’t a member of any other organizations or clubs, and neither was anyone else in the family.
Otherwise they were both very sociable, went to the movies, theaters, to concerts and generally out into society. And society used to come to our place. We had a lot of visits.
My father liked to take pictures – I’ve inherited that from him – my mother, I think, didn’t concern herself with photography. I also think that I, the same as they, like to travel.
Her mother tongue was Czech; there everyone spoke Czech, even though they of course all knew German.
As opposed to my father’s father, who was a bureaucrat body and soul, my grandfather was body and soul a businessman. He was a trained merchant, kitchen goods and hardware, and he made a living as storekeeper – he had a hardware store.
Katalin Andai
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My mother’s whole family lived in Oberland [today in Slovakia]. I don’t know anything about them, they all died, nobody survived. My grandparents lived in Kassa [today: Kosice]. Grandfather was a sportsman, he was tall and neat. He swam splendidly. He had a little moustache. They were not orthodox (nobody was in our family), no, they weren’t religious at all. They didn’t observe Sabbath nor were they kosher. They didn’t go to synagogue, not even at festivals. Grandfather came from a large family. He said that when he was seven years old, his parents told him: “Well, we have kept you for a long enough time, from now on you shall keep yourself; so off you go!” And he went to work at a near-by shop. He was completely uneducated, but he educated himself. He was a very curious man, he read a great deal; he spoke Hungarian, German, Slovakian impeccably. He also wrote in these languages. He had a beautiful handwriting – he wrote with Gothic letters. I think the family’s mother-tongue was German. My opinion is that they spoke German more easily than Hungarian. They talked to me in Hungarian, but not to my mother. My mother knew German like a native speaker, and she wrote letters in German. My grandfather always wrote to her in German.
My grandmother’s family observed their religion in a very particular way: they observed what was more comfortable to observe. The housekeeping was not kosher. They ate pork. We were always invited there [to the house of my grandmother on my father’s side] for Seder Eve, and all the brothers were there. The high holidays were observed by everybody in their own homes. The Seder was led by my oldest uncle, and for a time it was I who asked the Four Questions. There was no synagogue in Felpec, only a prayer house. At festival times, the Jews gathered together there. There were a few Jewish families in neighboring Tet, and they visited each other.
My grandfather had a street room, from which a so-called sitting-room opened. My cousins [the daughters of uncle Gyula] saw their suitors there. The sitting room had also a double glass-door, which opened onto the veranda. This was a big porch, L-shaped, onto which the kitchen opened from the longer side. There were two kitchens: a summer kitchen and a winter kitchen. The summer kitchen was closer to the porch, and I never saw anything going on in the winter kitchen, because I was there only in summer. In the back of the kitchen there were other rooms; those which had windows onto the porch were rather dark. And at the very end of the porch there was the outhouse. There was no water in the house, but there was a wash stand in every room with a washing dish and a pitcher, and a servant always made sure that there was fresh water in the pitcher. My grandmother had wonderful furniture. It was beautifully carved, and the year was on every piece, eighteen hundred and I-don’t-know, forty or something. If you stepped off the porch, there was a yard, and two tiny flower-gardens (enclosed with wire-fencing) opened from there, one to the street, the other one to the yard. And at the back of the yard there was the pigsty.
I knew my grandmother, Mari Perl, because she lived almost a hundred years. She was born in 1841. She might have had basic schooling because she could read, and she did read, mostly the prayer book. Just like a country woman. I was shocked by the fact that if she couldn’t eat something she said it would be good for Mari. And the servant ate the food she left. There was nobody else but the servant, a farm laborer’s wife who helped out if needed. But she raised her daughters to know how to run a house, and they could cook and bake, and they made all kinds of decorated fancy-cakes and sweets when their suitors came calling. My grandmother was a hard, energetic woman, but she had to be like that [in order to get on with housekeeping, the children, and the land]. But she read the prayer book night and day, and knew every prayer by memory. I can’t remember her ever reading anything else. I remember that she didn’t have glasses, she read the prayer book with a magnifying glass; I can still see her reading with the magnifying glass, but I could only see Hebrew letters there. I don’t think she was interested in anything else. Come to think of it, though, she was interested in gossip.
My grandfather died young. He had some land as well, and his widow raised the children in such a way that almost every one became qualified. Jozsef graduated technical college, Sandor became a mechanic, Bela was an architect with a university degree, and Janos was a doctor of law. And my father had two years of university as well.
There is an anecdote in the family about my grandfather, Ignac Deutsch. He was the son of Lipot Deutsch’s first wife, and when his father got married for a second time, he didn’t feel like staying at home with his stepmother. Because he was apprenticed as a butcher, (in those days journey-workmen used to go traveling), my grandfather wandered up and down the Austro-Hungarian Empire for two years. Then he decided to pay a visit to the parental house. He appeared all of a sudden. His second wife was cooking potatoes in the oven, and was just taking them out. The prodigal son stopped at the door, and said that he had come home. The second wife became very angry. Her son was goggling at the potatoes. But she grabbed a potato of the pan, and squeezed the potato into the stepson’s hand. I don’t know the consequences, but I don’t think he felt like staying there. Then my grandfather, realizing this was not the kind of woman he wanted to spend much time with, left, and settled down in Felpec. He didn’t continue in the butcher’s trade there, instead he started a pub.
Rozsi had a terrible death. She was shot by the Arrow-Cross in the Maros street hospital [the Hungarian fascists raided this Jewish hospital and killed patients, doctors and nurses alike] together with her 16-year-old daughter in 1944. Her husband had committed suicide a little earlier and she went to this hospital under a false name to be safe there. Their little boy Ivan survived the war.And her husband committed suicide in 1944. Her son survived, became an interpreter, and is still alive today.