When I was married, we all had low salaries, and so we couldn't live high on the hog. We used to only go to Balaton [Lake Balaton in Hungary], because it was cheap there.
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Displaying 13141 - 13170 of 50826 results
magdalena seborova
Sebor and I agreed that we won't even tell anyone about it. Once we were watching something on TV, I don't even remember what anymore, but they were saying something against Jews. The old man [the interviewee is referring to her husband's father] began getting upset at the program, that they're making Jews out to be idiots, why after all, they're intelligent people. Really.
My second husband had a PhD in natural sciences, in inorganic chemistry. He spoke five languages. We had a civil wedding. He wasn't a Jew. They were a decent family. They didn't know at all that I was Jewish.
They then built a co-op bachelor apartment, so I moved to Brno. Eventually we managed to exchange the bachelor apartment for a larger apartment. Sebor began drinking, more and more.
After getting married we lived in the house on Kozej Street. It was only one little garret. We shared a toilet with the other tenants. There weren't individual bathrooms.
In 1968 [21] there was already some sort of freedom of the press, I grew disgusted with it all because one day they'd write something and the next they'd take it back.
My first husband was a Slovak, but at home they spoke only German.
My first husband's family wasn't religious. They were secular. His mother was secular, as well as his second father. He was a sympathetic person. It was a case of a widow marrying a widower. We didn't observe Sabbath at home.
My father became a member of the Bratislava Jewish community. When he died in 1969, I arranged his funeral there. I was with him, because he was dying in some little chateau in Ruzinov. I was with him from morning, just at night I'd go home to sleep. Once I came at 5am, and they told me that he's died at 7 in the evening. They used to take the dead to the hospital at Na Kramare. Well, and so I went to Na Kramare. There was this little room there, where there were medics and one doctor who you could tell was a Jew. I asked him if I could speak with him outside. He agreed. 'Excuse me, my father died' and I went to reach for my purse, to give him a hundred crowns. He caught my hand and didn't let me open it. He said that the Jewish community had already taken care of it.
At work I came across expressions of anti-Semitism, mainly in the telegraph department, and even the president of the ROH [19] was a former captain of the Hlinka Guard [20]. I might have been about 19 years old then, but I was outspoken and with at least forty young people I organized a petition to have him removed.
As a phone and telegraph operator, I initially worked in the main post office building in Bratislava. In those days the post press service was located in Bratislava's Old Town. Several years ago it moved, to where the Bratislava train station is today - the New Town. When the company was still located in the Old Town, I used to go visit my colleagues.
When I was young I didn't do sports actively. I'd call it more recreational physical education, but hardly sports. In Bratislava, on Hlboka Street, I visited a Sokol clubhouse, but only when I lived in that Kozej Street. Then, when we got an apartment in Raci [a part of Bratislava], I had to stop, as I had it an hour further to work, and I didn't get home until after midnight.
Once I came to see her, and I thought my eyes would pop out of my head. There, there was a picture of the Virgin Mary and Jesus, with one of those bleeding hearts. I said, 'But Eva, you were a Communist! I liked you better when you were an atheist.' When she writes me, she doesn't write me about what she's doing, but writes me some passages from the Bible, so I hardly read it. When we were young we spent a lot of time together. I'd buy tickets to the theater and we'd go. During school years we also used to go camping together. During Communist times Eva was a Party member.
At school I didn't feel any anti-Semitism from the teachers, only from my classmates. They knew that I was Jewish, as in Slovakia a person who's named Kleinova can only be Jewish, nothing else.
Anna Hyndrakova
I thought about emigrating, although not to Israel, but in the end I decided not to go. We also asked our children to think about it but they couldn't make up their minds.
I've been to Israel once - for three weeks in 1991 on an invitation from some friends of mine.
After the revolution, my personal life changed in that I got divorced and remained single. Also, I had very bleak prospects as to how I would manage to pay the rent on my low pension. Things later improved thanks to various compensation funds and humanitarian contributions. After the divorce I started to work again, collecting the testimonies of Holocaust survivors for the Jewish Museum.
Before November 1989 I distributed Samizdat publications [22], for which I also wrote, but mostly we listened to Radio Free Europe [23]. I was enthusiastic about the revolution [see Velvet Revolution] [24]. I went on demonstrations even beforehand, and was once showered by a water cannon.
I didn't go the synagogue. I used to bake Easter cake at Easter and I celebrate Christmas with my daughter and granddaughter. We have carp [for Christmas dinner] and give each other presents. We also celebrate our birthdays together. I don't celebrate Jewish holidays; I only light the candle in honor of my sister and parents.
I then did the books at the Jiri Wolker Theatre and, later on, I looked after my grandchild, since my daughter was unable to find work for a long time. And then, starting in 1991 I began to document the testimonies of Holocaust victims at the Jewish Museum with my colleague Anna Lorencova. I went to see people who had survived and recorded their testimonies on a cassette, which I then archived at the museum.
In those days, the archive was basically not in operation; we sorted everything and turned it into the Terezin and Persecution Documentation collections, which are still in use to this day. People came there for photos and documents. I can remember once that a rabbi came from America to select photos and documents.
They didn't have a religious upbringing, as I hadn't had one either, but they always knew that I was Jewish and they knew about what had happened to me.
Both of my children have been to university; Alena is a microbiologist and managed a laboratory, Pavel is chemical engineer and runs a research and development laboratory for a large company of millers and bakers. They both have their own families.
I had my first doubts during the Slansky Trials [20]. After that, I no longer believed in it, but I still wanted to believe. I was mystified as to why, all of a sudden, a person's Jewish origin had to be stated. I hadn't seen socialism as an anti-Semitic system, nor had I come across any extreme manifestations of anti-Semitism after the war. I was ejected from the Party in 1969.
Anyway I believed in it. Uncle Leo said to me, "Don't go there, your dad was a Social Democrat.' But I thought that it was basically the same thing, except the communists were a bit more revolutionary and more for young people.
I joined the [Communist] Party, but first of all I was in the Czechoslovak Youth Association [19]. On the one hand, all my friends had joined the party, on the other, the Russians had liberated us and I thought that it was the only force that could prevent what had happened ever being repeated. And they wanted me to join. No one else wanted me. No one would miss me if I didn't return to the orphanage in the evening. In the Youth League, I was in a committee; it was a fine group and they arranged their meetings according to when I could make it.
After the war I went to a language school, but I stopped, as I didn't have the money for it. I also studied at university - the School of Politics at the Central Committee of the Czechoslovak Communist Party. It was the only university I could go to, as I didn't have a high school education, as I had been to a secondary technical school. I had a go at studying history externally, but I had two children, neither of whom was completely healthy to start with, and then I got to thinking that I was too old to do a normal course of study, and besides there wasn't the money for it.
After the war I returned to our pre-war apartment but somebody was living there and the lady who opened to me banged the door.
When I left Lublanska Street and started to live with my husband, we were pretty badly off financially, because they took away my grant of 1,200 crowns, seeing that I was married and my husband was earning. But he wasn't earning anything at the time, and when he was, it was very little. I had an orphan's allowance, at first 427 crowns, then 600 crowns, which was a pittance.
My brother-in-law's son bought me some new shoes and got me a job with a pediatrician, Doctor Kubena - I worked there part-time for a thousand crowns a month. I had to hold the children while they were being inoculated and to look up card indexes, but I only did this during the holidays. I then went to a school of graphic arts.