This is my paternal grandfather Robert Kraus. The photo was taken in Karlovy Vary in 1960.
My grandfather was from Uhlirske Janovice. The Kraus family lived by the Sazava River, in Vlasim, in Kacov. Grandfather had a lot of siblings, brothers and sisters. The family owned a farming estate in Uhlirske Janovice.
During the Communist era I went to have a look around in Uhlirske Janovice, sometime in 1981, I went to the cemetery and found my grandparents' tombstone. Later, still under the Communists, this cemetery was liquidated by burying all the tombstones in one spot and all that remained was just a lawn. The graves are there, of course, no one did anything with them, but it's not demarcated, there's just a bench and a memorial plaque. So that they wouldn't have to take care of it, they simply buried it. Which is basically according to the Jewish religion, if the tombstones are severely damaged and there's no one to take care of the cemetery, everything is buried.
Grandpa Robert Kraus had already moved to Prague as a small child, so you could say that he was actually a Prague native. He became a traveling salesman, so he traveled a lot, and that's why it's fitting that he met my grandmother Matylda Krausova, nee Kollmannova, on some train. The interesting thing is that Grandpa and Grandma got divorced, which in those days wasn't at all common. Grandpa then remarried, he married some Maria, I don't know her whole name, but I do know that she wasn't Jewish. That saved his life during the war, because she didn't divorce him, on the contrary, she tried to keep their marriage together. Marie kept him in Prague for the whole war, up to January of 1945, when he had to leave for Terezin, but he was actually only there for four and a half months and then came right back to Prague.
