His life's hobby was membership in the Esperanto movement, and during an international congress of this movement that took place in Prague he met my mother, who was also a passionate Esperantist. My mother would tell that when she saw my father, she thought that he was a Spaniard, because he was a little on the darker side. Because everyone spoke in Esperanto, you couldn't tell who was from where. But then, when they got to know each other more and spoke a bit, it came out that they were both Czechs. Their marriage took place in Prague at the city hall.
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Displaying 13561 - 13590 of 50826 results
Chava Pressburger
in those days before Hitler, when a Czech girl married a Jew, it meant that she was lucky, because a Jew didn't drink, usually made good money and was a good father and husband, which my father really did fulfill.
The apartment was furnished with beautiful and valuable antique furniture. Antique paintings hung on the walls, including one of Christ's head. After various trials and tribulations that painting finally ended up in my possession. It's a portrait painted by the Austrian Gabriel Max on the cusp of the 19th and 20th century.
The household was of course kosher, the synagogue was attended on only the major holidays and the rest of the Jewish holidays were observed at home. My grandfather didn't wear a kippah or caftan or anything like that. Neither did my grandmother wear an Orthodox wig.
In my grandparents' home, German and Czech were spoken, and they always had a maid.
After the Germans the house was occupied by Czechs to whom it had been allocated. Then the villa got into the hands of the Communist regime, which again moved its own people into it. After the fall of this regime the new government wanted to return the house to its original owners, and as their inheritors I and my cousin received a certain amount of compensation for it. But the house keeps living its life even with new residents, however I frequently dream that at night its original owners, my relatives, appear.
I taught for ten years at the Visual Art Center in Ber Sheva, but it has unfortunately ceased to exist. I became a member of the Artists' Union in Israel.
Then beginnings in Israel weren't easy, our finances didn't allow me to register in some art school, we had to work to make ends meet. Despite this, though, I attended various private courses given by various Israeli artists. I also learned artistic printing techniques such as etching, lithography, and finally also a technique that I have actually been using for more than the last ten years and which I have further perfected. This technique consists of the hand-manufacture of my own paper, which I then use for my artistic works. I make beautiful paper from plants that I pick myself and then process. Something similar is known as Japanese paper. Nevertheless, I don't just make paper for paper's sake, but during the manufacturing process I'm already forming a work of art. I give it various shapes, colors, or artistically print or finely draw on the finished paper.
Our household remained secular, as well as that of my son, his wife and his daughter in America. Tamar is the most inclined to observe traditions. Although she isn't Orthodox, she nonetheless observes all holidays, and so does her husband. We traveled abroad several times with the children, but now my husband and I travel alone. We've been to America several times to see our son and we often travel to Prague, which we both like very much.
Tamar lives in Jerusalem, she also finished university in Israel and has a PhD from the University of Jerusalem.
Yoram was in a special unit in the army as a parachutist, and took part in the Lebanese War [see 1982 Lebanon War] [14]. That was a very difficult time for us, when we were afraid that we'd perhaps never even see him again. Luckily he got through it all, was decorated, and began to study Mechanical Engineering at the local university. After he finished his studies he left for America, where he received a scholarship and completed a PhD.
In the beginning we lived in Ber Sheva in a comfortable apartment that my husband was allocated as part of his employment. A few years later we bought a small house in Omer, near Ber Sheva. The house stands in a very nice residential neighborhood, which isn't officially a part of Ber Sheva, but practically everyone that lives here works there. A lot of doctors, professors, more or less an intellectual elite, live here. The house stands on a lot measuring 1,000 square meters. I take care of our garden. When the house was being built, it was desert, today we have a beautiful lawn and many plants, bushes and tall evergreens, which have since grown to a huge height. We planted them because we were homesick for Europe, and wanted to have our own forest.
My parents stayed in Prague until the year 1956, and then also moved to Israel. My mother kept a kosher household in Israel as well, as opposed to me. She was also a big Zionist and had a talent for lecturing. While still in Czechoslovakia she and my father gathered films and slides and she lectured on Israel at the Esperanto Club. She then also gave lectures on the ship on the way to Israel.
and then we emigrated to Israel, where we were then married, and my husband took the name Abraham. My leaving Czechoslovakia was motivated mainly by my husband's Zionism and my love for him. A strong reason was also my desire for freedom, from the age of nine I had not been free and after the Communist putsch in Czechoslovakia I saw that another similar regime was coming.
He worked in the Zionist movement Hashomer Hatzair [13]. We met thanks to sports. I received a notice about a trip to the mountains that this Zionist organization was putting on, I went skiing with them, and so met Abraham.
At the beginning of the war, living with the worry that the Germans would confiscate their expensive antique furniture from my grandfather, my parents moved the furniture to Hradec Kralove to my mother's family. Everything that was hidden with relatives, we got back after the war without any problems. Many things were also preserved because my mother stayed home for the entire duration of the war. Problems came up in the case of property of my father's siblings, which was hidden with various Czechs. Only a small part of that property was returned, some simply denied it and refused to return it.
My father came to Terezin in April 1945, when after another change in the Nuremberg Laws he lost the protection of his 'Aryan' wife. Together we were then liberated by the Russian Army and in one Russian car returned to Prague, where my mother had already worn a hole in the floor standing in front of the window. Our reunion couldn't be happy without Petr's return, month after month we waited, but to no avail.
I have one witness to how Petr died. Jehuda Bacon, a well-known Israeli painter, who knew Petr from L417, told me that he saw him walking on the road to the gas chambers. Petr was always quite tall, skinny and pale. He was already in Terezin for two years when they transported him to Auschwitz, and he most likely didn't pass the selection.
As a small child, Petr wanted to be a scientist, writer or journalist. In Terezin he was the initiator and editor of a secret magazine, Vedem [11], which was published every Friday by a group of boys in Barracks No. 1 in L 417, where Petr lived.
People have asked me, how it was then possible that Petr was transported further on. But he wasn't the only half-breed that was sent from Terezin to the East. Though the explanation causes me great pain, I can't hold it against anyone, that when he tried to save a member of his family and had the opportunity to put a half-breed, though usually only a child, on the transport instead, he did it. It was a matter of life and death.
In 1944 I had to embark on the transport. I was never able to imagine it, but as a mother I know that it must have been unimaginably cruel. In this sense the fate of half-breeds was much worse than when the whole family left together. When the family had to tear itself apart and go into the unknown, that was very difficult for the mother as well as for the child. My mother was always strong, she comes from this healthy Czech family, and that's probably why she was able to endure it all.
My father didn't want to work at the Jewish Community in Prague, where many Jews that had lost their jobs worked as clerks. He said that it's not for him, that it's slacking off. He went to work in a Jewish orphanage, where he washed dishes, and I sometimes went there to help him out.
And so it happened that my brother was transported to the Terezin ghetto alone in the year 1942, at the age of fourteen.
My brother and I were considered according to the Nazi Nuremberg Laws to be half-breeds of the 1st degree, and therefore all anti-Jewish measures applied to us. There was only one difference: that the Germans took these children from mixed marriages to the concentration camps only from 14 years old and up.
Our father they threw out of work, us they threw out of school. The Jewish school was definitively closed during the school year 1941/42.
At that time we were supposed to emigrate to New Zealand, but our parents didn't take advantage of it in time. They said to themselves, we have our apartment here, and we're going to go somewhere at the ends of the earth, it won't be all that bad.
I think that Jews were always similar to the nations in which they lived. Thus Czech Jews were very similar to Czechs, and so responsibility, hard work was just as characteristic for Czech Jews as for Czechs. I didn't know anti-Semitism in my early childhood at all. Then when I was attending Jewish school, sometime in 1937 or 1938 or so, because of a lack of space a part of the school moved to the neighboring German boys' school on Masna Street. During recess we would go out into the schoolyard, which was separated from the yard of the German school by just a fence, and those small German boys would even then yell things like 'Juden heraus!' [Jews out!] and 'Jews to Palestine' at us.
During longer holidays and summer vacation we would always go outside of Prague with our parents. At Christmas and Easter we would go skiing to the mountains, while summer vacation we spent in the countryside, where our parents rented a bungalow. One place was named Radosovice. It was close to Prague, and our father would come visit us on the weekends. We were there alone with our mother and the maid. We would go swimming, for walks, picking mushrooms in the forest and so on.
I don't think that my parents belonged to some political party, but by their opinions I judge that they were social democrats. They had many friends, mainly from Esperanto circles, but also from others, and they were always very cultured people.
We attended the synagogue on only the major holidays. Our mother led a kosher household at home, but in a somewhat liberal fashion. At Passover, for example, I remember that we had matzot, but at the same time we ate bread and rolls. Dishcloths and utensils for meat and milk were separate, we didn't eat pork, we bought meat at a kosher butcher and as children we were brought up in a Jewish spirit. We observed all Jewish holidays. Chanukkah usually came out to be around Christmas time, we would light the menorah, and for Christmas we would go to Hradec Kralove to my mother's Christian family, and would celebrate Christmas there with them and would get gifts. It was a rich and happy childhood, which unfortunately lasted a very short time.