We practically spent our whole time in the army building military airports near Pilsen, Pardubice, Caslav and Line. I didn't mind manual labor; the only problem was that instead of two years we had to serve 32 months. The army as such wasn't so bad; it's just that afterwards a person was socially 'marked' for the rest of his life. The work wasn't difficult, despite that it was degrading for many. During schooling they made idiots of us.
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Displaying 4501 - 4530 of 50826 results
Pavel Fried
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I studied at the technical high school in Brno, from 1946 to 1950. After I completed my studies I was drafted into basic army service. I was assigned to the Technical Assistance Battalion [7], the so-called Black Barons, which meant doing your army service with a pick and shovel in hand.
In the middle of June 1945 they registered me in school. I was in the third year of council school. Despite having studied only two weeks, the teacher gave me a report card. It had only three B's. My good marks were a result of my stories from Terezin, because everyone was curious as to how we had lived there. I didn't have Jewish classmates in school any more. Basically I was the only one left of all the Jewish children that had lived in Trebic before the war.
In 1946 I became a scout.
My parents never considered emigrating. My situation was different. I received a permit to enter Palestine, and everything was prepared for my emigration. In the end nothing came of it. After all, my parents weren't young any more, my sister unfortunately never returned and besides me they had no one. It was decided that I would stay with them in Trebic; of course at fifteen one doesn't make his own decisions.
We were released from quarantine on 6th June 1945. At that time the trains were running again, so getting home was simple. We got on the train at the station in Bohusovice, because Terezin didn't have a station for passenger trains. The Germans had only built a provisional platform for the arriving transports. From Bohusovice we traveled straight to Trebic. There wasn't much waiting for us in our home town. The first few days we even had to stay in hotels, because our house had been sealed by the police. During our absence a German who had Aryanized my father's store had been living there. It took several days until we could move back into our original home. We found almost nothing of the original furnishings. So we used furniture that had been left there by the German. My parents got their store back, but in devastated condition. As one of the returnees, my father was greeted in Trebic by the regional governor himself. In his office he offered a seat to my father, who immediately recognized that his lordship had furnished the room with our chairs. We were glad that we had returned at all from the concentration camp, so my father overlooked such trivialities.
Terezin was liberated in May 1945. However, we prisoners couldn't leave. We were quarantined because various infectious diseases had spread mainly typhus and spotted fever.
A few months later my father was offered the position of Hausältester [German expression for the person responsible for order in the entire building]. A person in this position was responsible, for example, for distribution of food in the building and for ensuring that blackout curtains were in place in the evening. Mother once again asked her friend for advice, who advised her against my father taking it. She told her that someone won't black out their window and her husband will then be put on a transport or shot. Mother told my father that she had already once given advice and advised to her own benefit. Father therefore took the position of Hausältester, as a result of which he was along with his family exempt from the transports until the end of the war. In this way, also thanks to my mother's friend's advice, we were saved.
Before I was to have it, I ended up in Terezin, where this ceremony was performed secretly in a makeshift prayer room in the attic. The guards of course knew nothing about it. I recited what was necessary and that was the end of it. No celebration took place. It was just a formality that you had had your bar mitzvah. There were only a few people at the ceremony, the rabbi and my parents.
In the spring of 1944 I was also included on one of the transports. The fact that I was spraying the uniforms of German soldiers saved me from being transported to Auschwitz. The Germans agreed that I should be taken off the transport list because I was working for the Wehrmacht.
It was an extremely bold act, because even in Terezin it was forbidden to go out after 8pm, and stealing of course was completely out of the question. We risked our lives. We pushed the full bags over to my grandfather's, who praised our cleverness. My mother was of course distraught, she was afraid that someone would split on us. In the end we were big heroes. Grandpa got some flour from somewhere and made us skubanky. These were made in the following way: he would cook the potatoes, mash them, and mix in flour. The dough was then grated and you had skubanky. It was quite a delicacy in Terezin because what we used to get there to eat couldn't be called food.
The ghetto had a lot of organized work details. For example, I used to spray uniforms for the Wehrmacht, with white paint so that the soldiers would be camouflaged in winter. Before the war's end I was a delivery boy. A friend and I distributed groceries with a two-wheeled cart.
Before they deported us to Terezin we had to hand over all valuables such as gold and porcelain. To this day I have the receipt from the watchmaker who took them. Of course I never got anything for it. After that they gathered us in the Trebic high school. Each person could have up to 50 kilos of luggage. Many old women couldn't even take that much, for how could they have carried it. We walked from the high school to the train station. They sent us off in two transports. The first was called AV and was used to deport only residents of Trebic district. The second was called AW and contained Jews from Trebic and Jihlava districts. In the first, on which I, my mother and my father's parents were, there were 720 people. I know this because I had number 719 and was second-last. We left on 23rd April 1942, directly for Terezin. My sister and her husband went on the second transport.
The first anti-Jewish incident that struck our family happened in the year 1940. They Aryanized my father's store. A German came to our place and pulled out a document that said that he was going to be the administrator of Father's hardware store. In practice it meant that he confiscated the store. Subsequently we had a visit from the Gestapo from Jihlava who proceeded to search our house. My sister was already married and lived with us along with her husband. I remember that during the search, when they were arresting my father, the Gestapo found some cans of food. The opened them and one of them had gone bad. It spurted its contents out onto a Gestapo officer's leather coat. My sister brought some after-shave lotion and cleaned his coat. They arrested my father and took him away to jail in Jihlava. There they presented him with a sales agreement that he was selling his store. Instead of the money they were supposed to pay him for it they sent him directly to Terezin. He was very lucky, because the Gestapo usually sent people from Jihlava directly to Auschwitz or executed them on the spot. After my father's arrest we associated only with Jews.
Interestingly enough, in 1940 a non-Jewish friend came over and showed me some sort of map. It had a German concentration camp marked on it. It described conditions that I later myself experienced. I don't know how it came into his possession, and I don't know what it really was. The only thing he said was that it was a Jewish ghetto. From that time I recalled that map many, many times.
A year later they deported her and her husband Arnost to Auschwitz, where she perished in 1944, in the gas chambers.
My sister and her husband were deported together to Terezin in April 1942. In Terezin we met only sporadically: they were chance, short-term encounters.
Despite this Erika met a non-Jewish young man from Pilsen. In the times of the mobilization he was assigned as a soldier to the barracks in Trebic. In the end their relationship ended, because my parent's didn't like that he wasn't Jewish. If in those days she would have married him, maybe she would have survived the war.
The first anti-Jewish laws [in the Protectorate of Bohemia-Moravia] [5] affected my life in that I couldn't go to school, then to parks, the cinema, theatres and football. We had to be at home after eight in the evening, while other children were still running about outside. Once I didn't obey this rule, and it was then that I got a slap from my father for the first time in my life. These were the main changes I felt as a child. Due to not going to school and not being able to play in public parks, I lost contact with my non-Jewish friends.
In the time of my early youth Trebic was a working-class town. After the ghetto was opened, the wealthier Jews moved out of it. They were replaced by the Christian poor. After that the Jewish and Christian poor lived side by side. Demonstrations of anti-Semitism, without exaggeration, were mild. It can't be said that we had larger problems, at least I don't remember any. The coming of the Germans to Trebic changed the entire situation. A few individuals perceived an opportunity and rode the wave brought on by the occupation. Among these was our driver, Koudelka. He was the only person from our neighbourhood that joined the Germans. After the war he joined some church and repented his sins. Otherwise I think it was a town rare in its tolerance. Wealthy Jews could be counted on the fingers of one hand. Socially and economically, Jews didn't stand out from the town's population.
Each year Father led the seder; Mother prepared for it. Chanukkah was quite interesting in our household. In one room we had a chanukkiyah and in the other our maids had a small Christmas tree. Our family was always very tolerant of other faiths. Similarly tolerant were all of our maids; after all they did work in a Jewish household. They ate together with our family. Since they did the cooking, we kept all Christian fasts while they observed the Jewish ones. On Friday we never ate meat, because they cooked Christian meals. And on Saturday we all ate Sabbath meals. Our family never ate together except for on Sabbath. My parents both worked downstairs in the store, so first one went for dinner, then the other. They couldn't leave the store unattended.
We used to keep Jewish customs, with the exception that we didn't eat kosher, but we did keep all religious holidays. On Friday evening my mother lit candles and Father said broche. On Friday and Saturday our whole family would go to synagogue. Besides this, my mother took her prayer book and prayed every evening. When my father went away on business trips and didn't come to the synagogue, his friends would immediately ask him where he'd been and why he hadn't come to the synagogue. Services were in Hebrew.
My father and I never spoke about politics. Despite this I would say that he was inclined towards tradesmen, to the Tradesmen's Party. This was a party that you couldn't really even call political; it was more of a professional association or guild. I couldn't imagine my father being in some sort of national political party, such as the Social Democrats or Communists.
My father was a businessman. He owned a hardware store. Originally it belonged to his father, who in the beginning used to visit surrounding villages and collect scrap iron, bones and hides. For a long time my father had to do it as well, because grandpa insisted on it. After the gates to the Jewish ghetto were opened, my grandparents bought a house near the main street and started up the hardware store that I remember, with a collection of scrap iron, bones and hides. In those days the street was named Starecka, then Nezvalova and finally Stalinova.
There were no Jews in my grandparents' immediate neighborhood. Grandpa spent his free time in the town pub, where there weren't only Jews. He was friends with Jews and non-Jews alike. He went to the pub every Saturday night. He went there to play cards with his friends. During the week he didn't go to the pub, because he took care of the store, and on Friday he didn't go either because he observed the Sabbath.
The house had an extensive courtyard, where there were warehouses for the store. Father and Grandpa had a steel and oil warehouse and a large garage. In the garage a smaller company truck was parked as well as Father's new six-seater Tatra. For those days it was a fancy car.
Just like my grandparents, my parents also had maids. They were young girls who cooked and cleaned. They lived and ate with us. We had good relationships with them and visited each other even after the war, when they were no longer working for us. They even used to bring us gifts, such as butter and poultry, because after the war there was a shortage of food. I don't remember their names any more. In any case I used to call them all the same name, Marenka. For the laundry we used to hire washer-women, who also ironed.
The house was furnished with simple furniture, because my grandparents weren't rich. Besides, they had four daughters and had to save for their weddings and trousseaus. I don't remember them having a library.
rena michalowska
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I understand practically everything in Yiddish. But when I want to answer, my English pushes out my Yiddish. I must have put so much intellectual effort into absorbing English, that it has become dominant. I feel very bad for having stopped speaking Yiddish. I think that if I found myself in a community speaking that language, I would get it back without a problem. Now I'm painstakingly making up for those years when I had no time to read fiction, as the day was only 24 hours long.
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After WW2
See text in interview
My contacts with the Jewish community are very selective. I go to the Singer days and Jewish Book days [cultural events in Warsaw organized by the Jewish community since 1990's]. This year a wonderful panel was organized, called Assimilated Jewish Families. Since 1968 or 1969, when Ida Kaminska [32] left with the core of the theater group, I have not gone to a single performance at the Jewish theater, though I used to go before. I don't like ersatz.
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After WW2
See text in interview