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Between the two wars, you didn’t feel any anti-Semitism. My parents didn’t feel any anti-Semitism either, though there was a certain amount of segregation around. This segregation came from the Jewish side, not the Christian side.
My father often met Christians and was friends with them. They would meet on the street, for example. There were a lot of members of the Economist Club, doctors and all kinds with whom he played cards, but visiting each other somehow didn’t work out.
Today, it seems to me that this certain segregation came from the Jewish side. Later this stopped. My parents were athletic. We often went swimming together. Here, too, I noticed something. My mother was an absolute exception. That generation didn’t go swimming regularly.
They let us do anything on Saturday and holidays [that is, the family didn’t keep Sabbath]. If the weather was nice, we went on excursions. We went out to Devin to the Morva [Morava] river. Devin was our favorite place.
They would go out by boat to Devin, at that time it was terribly cheap. It cost one koruna. They had a great beach, a sandy beach. Naturally, we went up to the ruins, to the castle. Then we visited the Mountain Park, the Szand [excursion places in the vicinity of Bratislava], the Lower Carpathians are full of tourist places. We traveled a little ways by train, then went on foot. We toured seriously.
What did the families do on summer evenings? We didn’t have TV, and not even radio until 1928. It was natural to walk down to the banks of the Danube after dinner in the summertime. On the corner of Fisherman’s gate [Rybna brana] and present-day Sturova Street, where they’ve just begun restoring a few ballrooms, there was the Kern tavern with a very pretty terrace.
The walk generally ended with dad sitting down for a beer, and I would get a ‘krochedli’ or an ice cream. I should explain what a krochedli is. It was raspberry syrup, which you had to drink around a little ball in it. If you pushed the little ball, then it made a ‘grrr’ sound. So we went there. We walked every day in the summer.
We would sit down somewhere just occasionally. But on the bank, it was so comfortable, to walk all the way there, where today the PKO [Park kultury a oddychu – Culture and Rest Park] is. The Devin bank was nicely built up, with a lot of flower gardens. The Devin Hotel didn’t yet exist then.
There were old houses standing there, you could see the Palffy Palace from the corner. There were these cute one-floor palaces there. Of course, the city looked totally different then, we shouldn’t forget that Bratislava wasn’t such a large city at that time.
My father often met Christians and was friends with them. They would meet on the street, for example. There were a lot of members of the Economist Club, doctors and all kinds with whom he played cards, but visiting each other somehow didn’t work out.
Today, it seems to me that this certain segregation came from the Jewish side. Later this stopped. My parents were athletic. We often went swimming together. Here, too, I noticed something. My mother was an absolute exception. That generation didn’t go swimming regularly.
They let us do anything on Saturday and holidays [that is, the family didn’t keep Sabbath]. If the weather was nice, we went on excursions. We went out to Devin to the Morva [Morava] river. Devin was our favorite place.
They would go out by boat to Devin, at that time it was terribly cheap. It cost one koruna. They had a great beach, a sandy beach. Naturally, we went up to the ruins, to the castle. Then we visited the Mountain Park, the Szand [excursion places in the vicinity of Bratislava], the Lower Carpathians are full of tourist places. We traveled a little ways by train, then went on foot. We toured seriously.
What did the families do on summer evenings? We didn’t have TV, and not even radio until 1928. It was natural to walk down to the banks of the Danube after dinner in the summertime. On the corner of Fisherman’s gate [Rybna brana] and present-day Sturova Street, where they’ve just begun restoring a few ballrooms, there was the Kern tavern with a very pretty terrace.
The walk generally ended with dad sitting down for a beer, and I would get a ‘krochedli’ or an ice cream. I should explain what a krochedli is. It was raspberry syrup, which you had to drink around a little ball in it. If you pushed the little ball, then it made a ‘grrr’ sound. So we went there. We walked every day in the summer.
We would sit down somewhere just occasionally. But on the bank, it was so comfortable, to walk all the way there, where today the PKO [Park kultury a oddychu – Culture and Rest Park] is. The Devin bank was nicely built up, with a lot of flower gardens. The Devin Hotel didn’t yet exist then.
There were old houses standing there, you could see the Palffy Palace from the corner. There were these cute one-floor palaces there. Of course, the city looked totally different then, we shouldn’t forget that Bratislava wasn’t such a large city at that time.
Location
Slovakia
Interview
Katarina Löfflerova