Jiri and Richard decided to rebuild the confectionary warehouse. We didn't have very much money but the Orion confectionary factory gave them a credit in the name of their father, and so we got started. I worked with them, and my mum was at home cooking for us and doing the housework.
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eva meislova
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Our belongings had been hidden at different people's places, and we got some parts of it back. We had troubles with one furrier. He had a concave stairway in the house, and my mum had hidden a lot of things there, including carpets and original paintings that my dad was collecting. My mum had made a list of all the things she had actually put there. When we wanted these things back he made difficulties and, for example, just gave us the frames without the paintings. He kept saying that the Russians had confiscated everything, and my mum got upset about his lies and brought him to trial.
He didn't know anything about my brother. They had both been transported to Schwarzheide concentration camp in June 1944. Jiri said that Rudolf had been too weak to join the first death march and that he stayed in the camp. He then joined the second march but he was too weak. Jirka Frankl wrote to us that he was with him and that Rudolf had some cigarettes and wanted to change them for some food but without success. All the prisoners were weak and Rudolf didn't want to hold them up, so he sat down on the side of a ditch and was shot.
When we arrived in Tabor we met our friend Mr. Kratochvil, who had a furniture factory, and he offered that we could stay with him for a while. I didn't know that Jiri was already in Tabor. He didn't know that I was alive either.
We were rebuilding the factory. When the factory was supposed to be reopened air raids started and it was destroyed again.
After half a year I was moved with my mum to forced labor in a Frauenlager [women's camp] near Hamburg. We stayed there for four days, and it was very bad.
In Auschwitz we were in the so-called Family Camp. [The so-called Family Camp established in September 1943 was an area reserved within Auschwitz for Czech Jews deported from Terezin.] I was carrying barrels with soap, Mum still took care of the small boy who was gassed along with his father later. My brother worked with children in the Kinderblock [children's block] with Freddy Hirsch.
We didn't know where we were going to. It turned out to be Auschwitz.
Once we were listed for a transport to an extermination camp, and Viktor Kende, a friend of us, helped us to get crossed off the list of people to be transported. In December 1943 we were listed again, just my mum and I, but Viktor couldn't help us this time. My brother and Jiri weren't on the list for this transport but they enlisted themselves voluntarily, so they went with us.
I worked in a laundry situated outside the ghetto. My mum took care of a 5-year-old boy called Kaja. Kaja was there with his father only. They somehow became our relatives. My brother worked in agriculture first, and then in the Kinderheim [children's home]. My grandfather died a month after our deportation to Terezin, and my grandmother died a month after him.
It was terrible when we were deported to Terezin in November 1942. All the Jews from Tabor and the surroundings received summons for the transport to the ghetto from the Jewish community in Prague.
I had my last period in Terezin. But we got food with quinine in it there, and it stopped the menstruation of most of the women in the camp.
He was used to smoke, drink good coffee and have a good meal, so he just couldn't bear it. They were also torturing people. My dad died in Oranienburg in 1940.
Jiri celebrated his bar mitzvah with his relatives, and I remember that he got his first watch. That was in July 1934.
It didn't matter to us whether our friends were Jewish or not.
My mum joined a kind of friends club that we used to call 'club of old virgins'. About ten Jewish and Christian women used to gather. They either met in the coffee shop or at their homes and prepared some food and chatted. They also got together on New Year's Eve for a little afternoon party.
Neither my dad nor my granddad cared much about politics, and they weren't politically involved at all.
We didn't even know about Chanukkah. We didn't stick to kosher food, we ate pork and everything else. My mum bred geese in the cellar for meat and fat. As to Jewish meals, we only ate cholent and challah on Yom Kippur.
I was pretty good at sports. I used to go to Rytmika, where we were dancing to music. In winter I went skating and skiing. I also went to Sokol [5] for exercising. I was also a member of the scout group. I went to a summer camp with them two or three times, but I stopped before they could exclude me for being Jewish. I've never felt too much anti-Semitism. I just remember one incident: I was waiting at the doctor's and when it was my turn to go inside, I heard a fascist, a member of the Vlajka [6], screaming that as a Jew I should be waiting and be the last in the queue.
When I had to leave the gymnasium, my mum put me into a home economics school, which I fortunately only attended for one year. We were learning how to handle our future family duties, which I really wasn't fond off. My mum apprenticed me to a seamstress and was paying her 30 crowns a month.
Our class was a girls' class and all of them always behaved well towards me. I cannot complain about anything concerning anti-Semitism. My schoolmates didn't regard me as a Jew, and I never experienced any anti-Semitic acts from their side.
I finished the Czech school in Tabor, where we learned German from the 3rd grade. I think that the school-leaving exam was also in German. We also had religion classes. Then I attended gymnasium but I had to leave after the 5th grade, when we started to learn French, due to the fact that I was Jewish.
We knew a few more religious families in Tabor but most of the Jews didn't even observe Sabbath. Jews in Tabor for the most part only observed the high holidays. In those small towns Jews usually lived like the other Czech people. We celebrated Christmas and New Year's Eve like most of the people in town.
We lived on the first floor in an old house. We had a large apartment, three big rooms and a small one for the maid. We had a living room and a dining room with black furniture. My parents slept in the bedroom, and my brother and I in the living room. We had electricity at home and cold running water. We warmed the water in a high-tile stove, which we used for heating. There was a coal stove for cooking in the kitchen. My dad was always cold, and I recall him reading the Prager Tagblatt leaning against the stove and warming up. During the winter we only heated one room.
He was the educational type and wanted to become a psychiatrist. Rudolf was the member of a hakhsharah [3]. He spent two summers with them training in agriculture work. They lived there together and shared the money they earned. It was kind of a kibbutz life. The next year, that was either in 1940 or in 1941, my brother was already sent to forced labor. He worked on the river regulation in Sezimovo Usti. He was also working as a manual laborer when Bata [4] started to build houses in our region.
He finished a Czech gymnasium but wasn't allowed to continue the studies then because of his Jewish origin [because of the exclusion of Jews from schools in the Protectorate] [2].
My mother met my father on the train, and it was love at first sight. They had a Jewish wedding, and she moved to Tabor with him afterwards. She was a housewife, and in the afternoons she went to help my dad in the shop. She wasn't very religious. She only went to the synagogue on major holidays and much more to show off a new dress than for religious reasons.
Although she came from a Czech family she received German elementary school education. She was a young girl from a good family so she stayed in a girl's boarding school in Teplice, where she lived and studied and was preparing for family duties. It was a German secondary school.
I don't remember if my father studied anywhere. He was a businessman. He got his business license and became my grandfather's partner in the drapery shop. He wasn't religious. He didn't go to the synagogue except for Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah. My mother said that he actually withdrew from the Jewish community because they asked him for too much community tax.
My grandfather wasn't religious at all, he only went to the synagogue on Yom Kippur. He came from an ordinary Czech-speaking family, but he was a big fan of Austria-Hungary. My grandmother was religious but not extremely so; she kept a kosher kitchen, observed Sabbath and went to the synagogue on Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah.