We observed Jewish holidays as well as Czech holidays. We'd always celebrate things twice.
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Displaying 5851 - 5880 of 50826 results
marietta smolkova
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The Great Depression was truly an awful period. I remember the huge numbers of unemployed, and I remember how twice a week some of my classmates would come over for lunch, so that they would get a warm meal. On other days they went someplace else. It must have been horrible to wait like that until someone gave them something. My father's hair turned white overnight, because they had to let people go and he felt responsible for them and couldn't help them.
We lived on the middle floor of our villa. Below us lived in-laws of one of my brother's sisters, and the apartment above us was rented to some family of teachers. Our apartment had a terrace, where we usually ate in the summer. There was a large chestnut tree in the garden, whose branches reached up to the terrace. We looked out into greenery on all sides. At home we employed a cook, who also sometimes took me out in a baby carriage. But otherwise my mother brought me up, though my sister had had a nanny. On top of that we had one or two household helpers.
The town of Dubi was divided up into two parts, Upper and Lower. Lower Dubi was more industrial, and in Upper Dubi private villas surrounded the local sanatorium. Upper Dubi and Lower Dubi are connected by a road that leads to the German border. When they were married my parents bought a villa across from the sanatorium, and the factory was located in Lower Dubi, where my father walked every day for half an hour to the office. When it was raining too hard, he took the streetcar one stop, but then had to walk a ways more. We didn't have a car.
My father's Judaism was very lukewarm. The only people in our family that observed the Sabbath were Aunt Gusti and Grandma Brumlova. Everyone used to go to my grandma's for seder. I remember that I was awfully glad when my younger cousin started saying the mah nishtanah, and I didn't have to any more. My grandmother went to synagogue, but neither my mother nor my father did. We didn't cook kosher at home. For Yom Kippur my father would also fast by not turning on the radio that day, which for him was worse than not eating. He was a big music lover.
My aunt spoke German with my father, but she also knew how to speak Czech. Uncle Viktor was a German Jew, the same as my father. My mother spoke fluent Czech, because she was from Duchcov, and in that part of Northern Bohemia there was a relatively strong Czech minority, while my father was from the Teplice region, where on the other hand there were very few Czechs.
My mother admired my father very much, and always spoke of him as a very honorable and decent person. Later, when I was old enough to understand, she explained to me why it couldn't work between them. Their personalities were too different, my father was a loner and my mother was on the contrary a social being. My father educated himself a lot his whole life, but no one ever knew how much he actually knew. He was very much an introvert, the same as my sister. The Blochs and Brumls were actually very different families in terms of character. The Blochs were in general more reserved, a person had to know them well to understand them. The Brumls were smiling, open and always cracking jokes, and even though they were sometimes badly off, no one ever realized it.
My parents met in Teplice. They were married in 1915, and I think that they had a Jewish wedding.
From the age of ten he rented [a place] in Prague, where he was attending academic high school. In Prague he later studied at and graduated from a German business academy. He subsequently left for Paris for two years, where he studied French and spent a year in England because of English.
Once Pepa got a Russian uniform, and when he put it on, on the manufacturer's label he found the name of exactly that Eisner company. Because America and Russia were war allies, and besides weapons, the Americans were also supplying the Russians with uniforms. The label also had an address, and so he let the Eisners know that he was alive and where he was, and that he'd like to get out of there, but that it was taking a terribly long time. And the Eisners sent him a steamer ticket for the trip to America, but departing from Japan. So in some fashion he then got to Japan, but he was completely without money, when he walked by a barbershop, where he saw a sign reading 'Here we help Jews.' So he went in and they bought him a ticket so he could get to the ship.
In the end they didn't serve together, but both fell on the Italian Front [5], each on a different battlefield.
My grandmother was the most devout person in our whole family. They didn't cook kosher at home, and neither did she wear any special clothing. Nevertheless, she was very familiar with Jewish holidays, and knew everything that belonged to them. My grandparents observed Sabbath and my grandmother prayed, but she didn't attend synagogue regularly. For holidays we'd always go to her place. After Grandpa died, my grandma lived in Teplice with her son Josef and his wife Eli.
Her father died early on. Her mother ran a cigar store in Kostelec nad Cernymi Lesy, where she sold newspapers, tobacco and similar things, and my grandmother helped her with it from the time she was small. Her mother tongue was German, but she spoke fluent Czech. My grandmother likely didn't have a higher education. She was an expressly self-taught person. She drew beautifully and knew shorthand; she also knew a bit of French and could read Hebrew. My grandmother Ida was the only of my grandparents that I knew personally.
Grandpa and Grandma lived in Duchcov, in Northern Bohemia. He owned a textile store, a shop where they sewed and sold work clothes, like for example aprons or coveralls, which were intended for miners who worked in the Duchcov region. His mother tongue was German; nevertheless, he knew how to speak Czech.
I never got to personally know my grandmother or grandfather on my father's side. Their mother tongue was German. Both were from purely Jewish families, nevertheless I don't know what their personal relationship to Judaism was like. Judging by the attitudes of their children, I suspect that they were conscious of their Jewish identity but weren't religious. I think that more likely they financially supported Jews that found themselves in need.
In 1991 as part of the restitutions I requested the return of the Hahn house in Teplice and of our house in Dubi. The house in Teplice was returned to me, but the Hahns had two more houses, which to this day haven't been returned. It always depends on whether the person that is using the property is willing to return it or not.
I've always been a member of the Jewish community. On Fridays my husband used to attend the Old New Synagogue, and sometimes they'd come get him on Saturday, when they were missing a tenth person [for a minyan]. For Yom Kippur we always fasted, and I do so to this day. For Passover my husband, as opposed to me, ate matzot, as he was used to from the village, he dipped them into coffee with milk. My mother used to drip honey on them. What I do know of Jewish traditions is from Jaroslav. He knew how to pray, we attended the Jerusalem Synagogue together. My husband had a Czech-Hebrew prayer book, and I think that he knew how to read Hebrew.
In 1968 [25] we were very happy due to the growing freedom, the possibility of traveling. A year earlier my brother-in-law and his wife had been in Europe, and we met them in London. I won't forget how on Mustek in Wenceslaus Square my husband and I saw the Soviet tanks arriving, it was very ugly. My brother-in-law paid a dear price for the August invasion. He was very frightened by it, he managed to send us a telegram, whether we were all right and what could he do for us, and four days later he died of a heart attack.
My husband and I weren't Zionists, so leaving for Israel didn't tempt us either. But we did take an interest in events over there. In 1948 Israel was created [24] still with the support of the Soviet Union, it became a problem the moment the Communists realized that Israel wouldn't belong to the Eastern Bloc. So from that time on, all information about events in Israel was very biased.
But the StB also persecuted my husband because of the Jewish community, I think that their interest was caused by anti-Semitism, that they were more or less looking for a reason to put one more Jew in jail. The police didn't like the fact that my husband wouldn't let them look into the birth registers, so they could find out who was of Jewish origin. Then, in 1953 the birth registries were nationalized, and my husband moved along with them from the Jewish community to the District Bureau, back then the National Committee, on Vodickova Street. My husband was quite conservative and was used to his chair and desk. When he was leaving, the community lent them both to him, and he took them with him to the National Committee. The police then made a case of it and accused him of stealing the desk and chair, and interrogated him several times because of it. From the year 1950 onwards we were also certain that we were bugged, so we were very careful during phone conversations. That lasted a good twenty years.
They invited my husband to join the Party in writing, but he refused and never regretted it, although it brought him troubles. The StB [22] interrogated him many times, they were always looking for some reason and made life unpleasant for him.
An illegal Communist movement had existed in Terezin, so after the war many people automatically joined the Communist Party [20] and accepted the Communist ideology. I guess that in all of us there was a certain gratitude towards the Soviet Union for liberating us, but I definitely wasn't all fired up over Communism. In the machine tool department I had one colleague, who was ten years older, wasn't Jewish, but her husband had died in Terezin in the Little Fortress [21]. She lived alone with her daughter and had a boyfriend whose husband had also died in the Little Fortress. She was a party member, I think that she liked me. Once she told me, 'It's not out of the question that the committee will invite you to join the Party. Do what you want, of course, but if you want to preserve at least a bit of freedom, think it over, because otherwise you'll be limited by party discipline.' That was also one of the reasons why I decided to not join the Party.
We attended a lot of concerts, theater and exhibitions. I wasn't until the last two years that my husband's hearing was bad, so we began going to plays that he already knew, so he would at least see them. That last year I attended with only my former colleague from work and Jaroslav would always walk me to the theater and then come meet me afterwards. We used to go mainly to the Rudolfinum, National Theater and so on, which we had close by.
Our wedding took place in 1954. We didn't have any children, both of us worked very hard, so we divided up the household chores. We had a beautiful relationship. At the beginning of our life together my husband said to me, 'I've got two requests. We'll never argue, and we'll never be without bread at home, because I don't want to be without bread ever again.' We really never argued, and I'd say that in time we melded to the degree that one actually didn't exist without the other. Among my husband's duties were cleaning the ashes from the stove in the morning, and bringing up coal from the cellar. My task was to then prepare everything so that in the evening one only had to strike a match. My husband rose a half hour earlier and would go to the washroom. He would then prepare breakfast, while I did my morning toilet. We purposely left enough time for breakfast and would have a nice conversation during it, because in the evenings we were tired.
Jaroslav graduated from high school in Pisek and continued his studies at the University of Economics in Prague. He had his first final exam, when in 1925 his father died. So Jaroslav returned, to take care of his mother and take over his father's business. His father had still made his rounds to the farmers on foot, to offer them farm machinery. Jaroslav already had a motorcycle. He always told me about how he wished that he wouldn't have to make a living in this way after the war, basically in the role of a supplicant, greatly dependent on how the harvest would end up, and if he would get paid in the end. He said that he'd be a civil servant after the war, which also happened.
Many reunions took place, among others we also saw our father again in Terezin, who had been protected by his 'Aryan' wife for most of that time, but three months before the end of the war he was transported to Terezin.
On the day the Americans arrived in Dresden, we had to abandon the machines, at noon they loaded us onto cattle wagons and carted us off. Later we found out that the Americans had occupied the factory four hours later, and then handed the territory over to the Soviets. Unforgettable for me is my memory of one of the foremen, who when we were leaving, when everyone knew that no one would ever make munitions there again, was fixing the machines. His task was simply to fix machines, so he did it even at a time when the war was practically over.
Then news of the fact that the Germans were losing the war began to filter through. We observed how the SS women guards were whispering among themselves, and they allowed us to put on something like an evening of culture. In short, each one of us sang or recited something, according to ability. It was really a very nice evening, and then in closing one of the girls sang a German song, it was actually this hit back then: 'Eines Tages war alles aus, es ruhten endlich die Waffen.' [One day it was all over. Finally the weapons fell silent.] I remember that during this song we were very happy and the SS women were crying. The news that was reaching us buoyed us. We also heard that a peace conference was being planned in San Francisco in February, and we said to ourselves that a peace conference could only take place after the war. We had concrete hopes and began to count a bit on surviving. But there was still a long road ahead of us.
We worked in the munitions factory in alternating shifts, we worked on metal-shaping machines, unfortunately my sister and I weren't in the same workshop. We were constantly accompanied by that uncertainty, whether we'd see each other again after the shift. During weekdays the shifts were eight hours long, and on Sunday twelve hours.
We lived there in one of the factory buildings, the drying rooms, which had the advantage that it had central heating and we didn't suffer so much from the cold. We slept, however, on three-story bunks, and because there weren't enough of them, two girls slept on each bunk. The boards were weak, and one day my sister and I fell through and so had no place to sleep. I'll never forget how two girls lay down together so that we could get some sleep. One was Dr. Freudova and the second was named Reisova, neither of them is alive now. I considered it to be an immensely good deed, that someone gave up the advantage of having a bed all for herself.