The grandparents lived in Brno, in a small semi-detached house in Kralove Pole. They lost the house during the Holocaust. Since I was very small back then, I don’t remember the interior that much. They had a bedroom and a dinning room for sure. They weren’t that rich and the house furnishings actually corresponded to their prosperity. They already had water mains installed in the house but when I was a child, they lit the rooms with gas lamps and heated the place with a Dutch stove. Electricity was installed later on, approximately at the beginning of the 1930s.
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Zuzana Wachtlova
Grandma also wore the same type of clothing as other women in Brno. She never wore a wig, not even a scarf because she wasn’t an Orthodox Jewish woman. She used to wear a hat, though, but probably not due to religious reasons. In those days, a hat was part of a fashionable outfit and was worn by women of any confession.
The Grandparents talked to each other mostly in German. My grandfather’s mother tongue was Czech but he also spoke German. Grandmother was of German origin, therefore, her German was perfect but she never really mastered the Czech language in her new home.
My grandpa owned a liquor store in Trebic. I don’t know what the reason behind his moving to Brno was. In Brno, he opened a fruit juice manufacture. It was located at the former Vienna Street. Today this street doesn’t exist anymore because apartment blocks were built in that area. I think my grandfather didn’t have any employees and most likely, his own children helped him out. My grandmother was a housewife – it was common at that time. They had four children together: Helena, Alice, Bedrich and Marta.
Libavske Udoli was a small town. Its inhabitants were mainly workers and employees of the textile factory. They didn’t have any synagogue or a place of worship. I suppose that my grandfather used to travel to some close town to go to the synagogue on the major holidays, for example to a present-day Sokolov [former Falkenov] but I’m not really sure about these things. I don’t think they kept a kosher household.
My grandparents talked to each other mainly in German. They both spoke Czech as well as German and used to communicate with me in both languages. Both of them dressed the same way as other people in Libavske Udoli. It was not possible to recognize their Jewish origin according to the dresses they were wearing. My grandfather didn’t have side curls or a moustache and my grandmother didn’t wear a wig or a headscarf because they weren’t Orthodox Jews [1].
When they decided to move to Libavske Udoli, they sold their house. They lived in a family house in Libavske Udoli. The grandparents were not rich and furnishings of their house were rather modest but not poor.
After the year 1989 I felt like a free person because I could travel without restraint. I believe the situation improved also for Jews because during the totalitarian regime, we weren’t allowed to openly speak about Israel. For example, in a lawsuit against Slansky [40], the term Zionists was preferred in order to avoid suspicions of anti-Semitism.
I visited her for the first time in 1964 when I got permission to leave the country. I traveled individually with my younger son Michael.
Michaela Vidlakova
While still in the shloiska, my father showed them this toy and demonstrated with it how to utilize wood remnants. That saved my father as well as us from immediately being sent further on, because part of our transport didn’t even leave the shloiska, and was transported away. That took place towards the end of December 1942.
My father had his tools with him, and samples from the toy workshop where he worked as a laborer after he was fired from his job for being a Jew.
I got to Terezin for my sixth birthday. I remember one thing from the train trip, from the town of Sedlec by Prague, where there once used to be a restaurant inside a big concrete elephant. My mother called me to the window to have a look at the elephant. I didn’t know what one looked like, because we were forbidden from going to the zoo. So she wanted to show it to me, and said that on the way back we’d take another look at it.
My parents hid a lot of our things with the family of my father’s cousin, Viktor Lauscher.
I remember that I was so preoccupied by this drawing on the walls that I completely forgot that the next morning we were going to the transport. As well, life in Prague under the Nuremberg Laws was very circumscribed, I’d never liked it that much in Zizkov, and so I also somewhat perceived our transport as an interesting change. I wasn’t capable of imagining that things could get even worse.
As a Jewish child this was forbidden to me, but I remember that I did go for a ride like this with him once. I later asked my mother how it was possible, and she told me that this man, when he would be going home in the evening, would give a ride down the street to Jewish children that would occasionally be waiting there for him. I must’ve been around four back then. He was this old, small, and terribly kind man.
My father and mother were of course both members of the Jewish community. My mother was an exercise instructor in Maccabi [16]. After the occupation, groups were being prepared in the community for emigration to Palestine. So both my parents led so-called retraining courses, where young people practiced various skills necessary for life in Palestine. My mother taught childcare and my father handicrafts. When even the Jewish school was then closed, my mother organized a school group right in our apartment.
Both my parents voted for the Social Democrats, but they weren’t members of the party, just sympathizers. For some time my mother was a bit leftist, and was involved in the so-called Red Help, which was something like assistance for people who were escaping Germany, running away from Hitler. It was probably some sort of leftist-oriented organization, because a lot of Communists and Social Democrats were escaping from Germany. What exactly she did for them, I have no idea.
I didn’t classify my friends according to origin or religion. The fact that I used to get gifts for Chanukkah and others for Christmas I just took as that everyone’s got their own thing.
When we then lived in Zizkov, Grandma and I would at least walk along U Rajske Zahrady Street, which led along Rieger Gardens; I was no longer allowed into the park itself anymore either. There was this open area there, now it’s been built on, where boys used to play soccer. But it wasn’t an official park. It was one of the few places where Jewish children could go. Then we also used to go to the Jewish cemetery in Zizkov, and used to play amongst the graves; there was even some sort of Jewish musical event there, the audience would sit on the edges of the graves.
I don’t know exactly when it was, but I think that sometime during 1941 the Germans forced us out of our apartment. We moved to Zizkov [a Prague neighborhood] into an apartment with Grandma and Grandpa Katz, who lived in a zone where they weren’t evicting Jews. It was an unattractive quarter and an old, uninteresting building. But because they had a large apartment, we had to move in with them. While we were still living there together as a family, it wasn’t all that tragic. My father, mother and I had the use of one room. I think the other grandmother or someone else from the family was also living there.
We didn’t cook kosher at home. The only Jewish food that we liked a lot were two side dishes. One was roasted semolina, and then gratings, in Yiddish ferverlach. Ferverlach isn’t grated bread, but dense noodle dough that’s grated on a rough grater, then left to dry, is roasted and then has either soup stock or just hot water poured over it. It’s also a side dish, and is very good.
My parents had very nice furniture at home, designed by a friend of theirs from the Zionist movement, who left for Israel before the war started. It was in the modern and elegant style of the 1930s.
All the appliances in the kitchen ran on electricity, and behind the kitchen there was a room for a maid, who lived with us. She was a young Czech girl named Terezie Hronickova. My mother used to go to school to teach, and this ‘Rezinka’ of ours took care of me. She loved me very much, and I her too.
We lived in Prague in the neighborhood of Letna in a modern apartment on Hermanova Street. The apartment had central heating and hot water. We probably had parquet floors, but in one room there was this soft rubber with blue stripes. I liked it a lot back then, and loved playing there, because it was soft and wasn’t slippery. It wasn’t my room; I didn’t have a room of my own, but I played there the most, and I remember the rubber on that floor to this day. The apartment had this smaller kitchen and then a bedroom, a living room, and some sort of den of my father’s with bookcases.
We belonged to the middle class. My mother taught at a school and my father worked in a small furriery.
My parents observed Jewish traditions at home. We went to synagogue for the High Holidays, and at home we celebrated all the Jewish holidays. My father wore a kippah only in the synagogue, or for Passover or when he was lighting candles. For Chanukkah we lit a candelabra at home, and sang Chanukkah songs. My mother also fasted on the 9th of Av [in Hebrew, Tisha B'av: fasting, is observed as a memory of the destruction of both the first and second Temple] and for Yom Kippur, but my father didn’t and they didn’t force me to. In our household Sabbath took place without prayer; we just made a fancier supper, had a white tablecloth and lit two candles.
My mother attended Czech schools and graduated from the Faculty of Philosophy at Charles University in Prague. She actually didn’t have a PhD, just state exams, and then went to work as a teacher right away. She became a teacher at a Jewish school on Jachymova Street in Prague. She began teaching Grade 1 while she was still at university.
To this day, it’s this second home of mine. When I arrive, they greet me like a daughter of the kibbutz, even though I wasn’t born there and I didn’t get over there for the first time until after 1989. At that time my father was 88 and wasn’t in good health, and so sent me in his place. We traveled there with a group of anti-Fascist fighters.
Then in 1925 he moved to what was then Palestine, and became one of the founders of the Sarid kibbutz, which today is a medium-sized kibbutz close to Nazareth.
My father had a brother, Frantisek, who was two years older than he. He graduated from university in chemistry, but I don’t know exactly when and where. He worked as a chemist in yeast production. He lived in Prague, but often traveled abroad on business.