The Flusser family

This photograph, taken in Teplice in the mid-1930s, shows the Flusser family. Sitting on the left in the bottom row is my mother's brother Kurt, sitting beside him is my grandfather Otto Flusser, on his left is my grandmother Elsa Flusserova (nee Hackelova), sitting on the far right in the first row is my mother's brother Hans. Standing in the top row, from the left, are my mother's sisters Ruth, Gertruda (Trudy), Luisa, Anna, and my mother is standing on the far right. Back then there were six thousand Jews living in Teplice, after Prague it was the second largest German-speaking Jewish community. Teplice was in the Sudetenland, and Czech wasn't spoken at all there. My grandpa was a trained butcher, he had his own butcher shop, but interestingly enough, it wasn't a kosher butcher shop, but a normal butcher shop, because he wouldn't have stood up against the competition, as there were a lot of kosher butchers there. He had a shop across from the Hotel Ditrich, which when I tell this to Teplice natives today, they say that that's as good a place as you could get. In 1938, right after Munich, the entire Flusser family moved to Prague. They left absolutely everything in Teplice - their apartment, store, and property; they picked up and escaped to Prague. It was very hard for them to get used to Prague and get a foothold there, as they didn't speak Czech. People in Prague looked upon them as Germans. But in the end they established themselves there.