Then in 1931 my father built a house where we, Grandpa and Grandma Rauchberger and Uncle Samuel lived. My father also had a store in that house, which he opened at the beginning of the 1930s. Half of the store was devoted to shoe supplies, which he used to buy from Mr. Konvicka, who had a leather factory, and who was a family friend.
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Displaying 9871 - 9900 of 50826 results
artur radvansky
After they were married, my parents rented an apartment in a building that belonged to Mr. Habr in Radvanice. It had two rooms and a kitchen.
In 1923 my two twin brothers, Karel and Max Thüeberger, were born. Unfortunately my mother's fears due to her and my father being related were realized, because my brothers were born deaf-mute and mentally retarded. Thus my parents had to continually take care of them.
At the end of World War I my father was at an infirmary in Vienna. My mother went to see him, and for fourteen days took care of him and visited him. There they also decided that they'd get married. Which they then did in 1920, when they had a clerical wedding, because in those days you didn't have to go a government office yet.
She was educated as a seamstress, but when my father opened his store, she stopped sewing and helped him in the store. She and my father were the same as far as religious inclinations went. My mother was very culturally-minded. She loved the theater, and especially opera.
My father apprenticed as a store salesman. He observed all religious holidays, ate kosher, but on Saturday he worked and didn't keep Sabbath, so he wouldn't lose customers.
Radvanice was a small town that already in those days had electricity and running water. I remember that my father had an electric refrigerator in his store. The nearest large city was Ostrava, from which led a narrow- gauge streetcar through Petrvald and Radvanice to Orlova and Karvina. My grandparents' relations with their neighbors were problem-free. A journeyman by the name of Jurecek, who came from the Polish Beskids, lived in my grandpa's workshop. My grandpa was also friends with the Radvanice vicar. They played cards together in the Workers' Lodge, and bowled at the Sokol House.
My grandpa after he got up, twice a week he shaved, and not with a razor, but with chemicals, something that was like quicklime. He shaved in this fashion because according to the Jewish religious ritual, he wasn't allowed to shave with steel. Afterwards he'd have a shot of slivovitz or some other liquor and would start praying in the bedroom. When he prayed, it had this nice melody and I loved to listen to him. When I was around three or four, he even taught me this little prayer for the morning and evening.
I greeted the revolution in 1989 [Velvet Revolution] [21] with enthusiasm. My first trip to the West led me together with Misha Vidlakova to visit a friend in West Berlin. Along with her we then set out via Austria to Switzerland, to her friend's place, where since that time we go every year to ski. Misha Vidlakova and I are active in the Terezin Initiative. She's in one of the head positions of this foundation.
My relationship with the state of Israel is very sympathetic. I know that if worst comes to worst, I've got someplace to go.
Our grandchildren also take part in all the events put on by the Prague Jewish community for young people. Besides that I also tell them about my wartime experiences.
Misha Vidlakova and I had known each other since the 1950s. In 1956 my wife Alzbeta fell ill, and in 1957 she told me that she didn't want to live with me any longer. We did live together for another two years, but finally it was no longer possible to endure. Back then I had a choice. Either divorce Alzbeta, which I didn't want, or keep on like up to now. In the end I stayed with her, and eventually met and got together with Misha, with whom I'm 'friends' to this day.
My attitude towards this issue changed when Anicka heard the curse: 'You smelly Jew!' at school. At that moment I realized that my hopes that people would forget about our Jewish origin were in vain. After all, I would sometimes walk around in a short-sleeve shirt, and so you could see my number from the concentration camp on my arm, plus I'm registered at the Jewish religious community. I started to blame myself for not telling my daughter anything, while the children at school already knew it. So I said to myself, enough, and started telling Anicka that there had been bad people that had sent her grandma and my whole family to do hard labor, during which they didn't give them enough to eat, and they died.
Despite my being raised in a religious environment and also having had a clerical wedding, I didn't raise my children in a religious way. I was afraid that if the Jewish persecutions returned, that my children would suffer. In the beginning my children didn't notice anything.
This then is how the mental shocks that Alzbeta had daily experienced at the Gestapo precinct at Auschwitz manifested themselves. At the hospital they gave her electroshock therapy, because back then that was probably the only treatment. From that time on my wife has been ill and my legal dependant, and I take care of her at home. It's a hard life. Sometimes she also wakes me up at night and starts to sing or recite something, either in Hungarian, English, French, German or Russian. Because she speaks all of these languages.
I did my exam in inorganic chemistry with a professor whom I had met in Sachsenhausen. I did my exam in organic chemistry with Professor Sorma, with whom I then worked at the Academy of Sciences.
During World War II he then served in Tito's [17] army, where he worked as a dentist.
I 'skated through' the Communist putsch and the subsequent Communist years as a member of the resistance, an anti-Fascist, I was in the Association of Freedom Fighters and trade unionist.
But by Sunday she was feeling better, so I talked to her and we decided to go dancing in Barrandov on Sunday. And at the dance we decided to get married. She then introduced me to her brother Laszlo. We were married in 1946 in the Old New Synagogue.
There I found out that my entire family had died. About my father I knew. My mother died in 1942 in Maly Trostinec in Belarus. As far as my brothers are concerned, I had suspected that they didn't survive, being deaf-mute. And they really did die in a euthanasia institute in Kromeriz. Grandma Rauchbergerova and Grandpa died in 1942 in either the Treblinka or Majdanek concentration camp. The only one to survive was Uncle Arnold, who due to being unemployed left at the end of the 1920s for the Heftzi-Ba kibbutz in Palestine, later Israel. He worked there as a shoemaker and raised chickens. I myself never left for Israel.
In Auschwitz I once again met up with an unselfish member of the German medical corps. It was Maria Stromberger, an Austrian. She made very good friends with my friend, the Polish prisoner Eduard Pys. Thanks to him she crossed over completely to our side. She scrounged up medicines for us, or also tried to save our relatives and friends. Thanks to her connections with members of the SS we were able to secretly deliver the SS members' leftover food to the camp.
We were transported off to Auschwitz around 15th October 1942. There I also got to my third selection. For this one we assembled washed, with our hair cut and naked on the assembly square. Here we also got numbers and so lost our identities. From that time onwards, we were only numbers, not people.
In Sachsenhausen I was also a participant in the first prisoner uprising which wasn't bloodily suppressed.
We were in Sachsenhausen for only a short time. I worked there in the 'Schuhkommando.' Its job was testing shoes for a factory that was competing for orders from the SS and the army. Part of the road was asphalt, part concrete, part made up of small stones, partly of large ones and so on. We tested all day, rain or shine. During testing we couldn't go to the toilet, eat or drink. Many people who couldn't handle walking or even running on the road died there, because they were shot.
I was also present at a second selection at Ravensbrück. They were picking out young people, on which the SS were testing new medicines. Most of the selected people then returned around July without arms, legs, basically cripples. I was lucky that they didn't select me there. About two years ago I found out the name of the euthanasia institute where these atrocities were perpetrated. It was the Sonnenstein castle, near Pirna.
It was unpleasant work, but the good thing there was that the SS didn't guard us, but members of the Wehrmacht, who didn't yell at us, didn't beat us, there were even a few Sudeten Germans among them, who spoke Czech and gave us bread.
After a half hour we'd return, remove the laundry from the oven and carry it. We carried it on our backs, and not a few of us were half-poisoned from it. The guys from the Sudetenland, who were working there with us, had also warned us to not sniff the disinfected laundry. At that time no one yet knew how Zyklon B would be used in the future.
In April 1942 I got into Ravensbrück [15]. In Buchenwald they loaded us onto a train, where we traveled in relatively decent conditions. There were about sixty of us in one wagon, plus about ten German soldiers. We arrived in Ravensbrück at the Furstenberg station, and from there they drove us to the camp in cars.
The chief of the hospital in Buchenwald was a locksmith, and an exceptional young Communist, Walter Krämer. In 1933 they had thrown him in jail as a Communist; there he learned to do surgery. He was an excellent surgeon and gradually worked his way up from nurse in prison hospitals to the position of chief of the hospital in Buchenwald, where he arrived in 1937. And Walter Krämer convinced the SS that even as chief of the hospital he can't guarantee that the infections from our camp won't make their way via ground water into their camp. God only knows why they didn't shoot us all back then. Out of 3,800 prisoners around 300 of us remained. I was emaciated, just skin and bones, bugged-out eyes. At the time, with my height of 175 cm I weighed only 30 kilos. I couldn't lift my feet or get up on a chair. Our clothing was in tatters, only the shoes lasted, but were leaky. We all had frostbite. And in this situation one day arrived Walter Krämer with nurses and took care of what they could.
My father died of hunger on 20th November 1939. His last words, when my friends carried me to him - at the time I had frostbitten feet - were for me to help my mother and protect my brothers. This I promised him. It was horribly painful for me, and even now I can't hold back the tears when I think back to it.