Immediately after the occupation [18] began the arrests of active anti- Fascists according to lists prepared in advance, and so during the first days after the occupation our father didn't sleep at home, occasionally he dropped by during the day, but for that we had a special signal: if there was a blanket hung out on the balcony, it meant that the Gestapo was at our place.
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Displaying 6931 - 6960 of 50826 results
Asaf Auerbach
My parents' youth was marked by membership in a Zionist movement [9] that was 'in' in those days, that's how they say it today, right? There they most likely met, and were preparing for the return to the Promised Land. They were preparing for kibbutz work on some farm, and were learning Ivrit, or modern Hebrew. In 1922 they emigrated to what was at that time the British Protectorate of Palestine. They became members of the Bet Alfa kibbutz, they were among the founding members, they arrived in a wasteland that had been purchased from Arab sheiks, set up tents and gradually fixed it all up.
My father's family, those were very poor German Jews, my mother, on the other hand, came from a middle class, Czech Jewish environment. My grandfather, Jindrich Fantl, born in 1867, was from the village of Chlebnik. My grandmother, born in 1873, had I think always lived in Prague. I knew her mother, thus my great- grandmother. She was named Roza Epsteinova, was born in 1848, so the year when my one generation younger Grandpa Auerbach was born, and died in the year 1936, by then I was eight years old, so I remember her. She'd apparently had a pub, but by the time I knew her she was already living with her daughter, for many years she took care of her household, because Grandma spent a lot of time in the store.
She didn't have it easy after the war. A small pension after her husband - how much could have it been after about five years' employment - my uncle could no longer support her, there weren't too many piano lessons after the war, her prewar 'clientele' had most likely been predominantly Jewish. The relatively large apartment in Nusle, where they lived up until the transport to Terezin, was never returned to them. Instead, they gave her and Dita a sixth-floor attic bachelor apartment in Pankrac, which had a slanted ceiling and about 16 square meters [about 170 sq. ft.], without an elevator, so they lugged coal from the cellar up to the sixth floor on the stairs.
I was there in the year 2000, and there I realized that it's more than a typical tourist trip with a travel agency, that my roots are there, that once long ago, my ancient ancestors were born, lived and died there. But even before I had realized that it's home to many who by miracle escaped the Holocaust, their children and their children's children, that's why for me it's something different than it would have been if...
On the other hand, I think that my feeling of fellowship with Jewishness would have in time quite faded, if what happened hadn't happened, and life after 1937 would have calmly continued on like it had before, and I wouldn't have had immediate contact with anti-Semitism. And that especially after the death of my grandfather, who was my strongest bond to Jewishness, who would have certainly led me to my bar mitzvah...
So why am I also a Jew? And am I with a small or capital 'j'? Too bad there's not some third one, that would suit me the best. Jewishness is simply something in me, independent of my will, whether I like it or not, even if I switched to a different religion, like the Bishop of Olomouc, Kohn [Kohn, Theodor (1845 - 1915): Roman Catholic church official, partially of Jewish origin], because my parents were Jews, their parents were also Jews, their parents' parents and so on until those biblical times, when Czechs didn't yet know that they'll one day be Czechs.
,
After WW2
See text in interview
All right, I'm a Czech as well as a Jew, and don't feel the need or necessity to quantify the ratio between my Czechness and Jewishness. And why, what good would it do? I'm Czech for the same reasons as all other Czechs. I've been living here almost since birth, almost my whole life, Czech is almost my mother tongue and it's a language that I have the best command of in comparison to the others that I also speak in one way or another. I attended almost exclusively only Czech schools, my ancestors have been living here for at least two centuries, and most likely much longer - what if the one in the old cemetery is some sort of distant relative - so I've got a common history with Czechs, but not only with Czechs. Czech culture is the closest to me, it's an environment that I'm used to. So I don't have a reason to not feel myself to be a Czech, even though they sometimes annoy me. Especially their frequent expressions of xenophobia. But that's not specifically a Czech trait.
,
After WW2
See text in interview
I lived in a mixed marriage and didn't feel the need to associate with this religious community. Now I regret it, at my age I don't know how to find my way back to it any more.
When I was in the army, that was at the beginning of the 1950s, they wanted us to leave the faith. I was an atheist, so logically I said to myself that I've got no business being in it. So I filled out the form and gave it back to them. Luckily soldiers are disorganized, I don't know where the form ended up, the community still sends me a deposit slip for a religious contribution before each Jewish New Year, since the amount of the government contribution depends on the number of contributors.
And what about us atheists? Not long ago I was talking about it with one wise, educated man, a retired university professor, also a non-believer. When I told him that I don't know the answer to what I'm more of, a Czech or a Jew, he told me that he's first and foremost a Czech, and only then a Jew. And he went through the worst prison camps.
No, we didn't even have Christmas at home. Most likely I asked about it at home when my friends were telling me about Christmas supper and presents. But at home they apparently told me that Christians have Christian holidays and we Jews have our Jewish holidays. I guess that satisfied me, because I know that I didn't envy my classmates their Christmas. I was satisfied by this logical explanation. Even though later I found out, to my amazement, that some Jews celebrated Christmas precisely because they didn't want their children to feel left out.
But life had to go on, so I went to the nearest high school and scraped through the remaining two years before graduation. After graduation some classmates and I left for three months to help farm in the depopulated border regions. Back then it was allegedly a precondition for acceptance to university, many sneezed at it and they accepted them in school anyways.
I lived there for two years, until I graduated from high school. My bed was in a room which was at the same time the dining room, you walked through it from the foyer to the living room, bedrooms and washroom, so there was no privacy.
My memories of childhood are basically tied only to Vrsovice. Back then it was still full of empty lots, a little ways away from us were the barracks of the 28th Infantry Regiment and its military training grounds, we children were also allowed on them, a few hundred meters further Eden, with merry-go-rounds and a summer athletic grounds, which in the winter changed into a skating rink. We had everything.
When at the end of the summer holidays in 1936 we came back from pioneer camp [12], our parents were waiting for us at the train station, but instead of Podbaba we drove to Vrsovice. To our third, and last apartment. They didn't tell us about the move ahead of time, it was a surprise. It was a new building, the apartment was more spacious, there was a large living room, which was the children's room and dining room, our parents had a room that was a little smaller, and along the entire width of both rooms there was a balcony.
They let me repeat 5th grade, after a half year they judged that I already knew enough English, and transferred me to 6th grade, where I belonged age- wise. There I finished Grade 6 and 7, then I passed an exam for a two-year technical school, there I liked it, the teachers knew how to capture our interest, I finished it without any problems. With honors, even. I spent the last two years in England in a Czechoslovak state high school, which was financed by the Czechoslovak government-in-exile, where I on the other hand did have problems. Not due to Czech, that I hadn't forgotten, as opposed to many others, but with having to memorize boring subject matter, that I didn't enjoy. And so I just scraped through.
Near the end of May, maybe the beginning of June, a letter arrived at school from my brother, who had in the meantime arrived in Prague with the army. In it he wrote that he hadn't found anyone in Vrsovice, so he had gone to Smichov, there he found Aunt Oly and Mirjam and Grandma, that Grandpa had died and that the only thing that was known about our parents was that they had been transported someplace from Terezin, and from that time on, nothing. He probably already realized, most likely from what Aunt Mirjam had told him, what fate had befallen them, which he couldn't bring himself to write me outright, and so I lived on in the illusion, or hope if you like, that they'd still appear out of somewhere.
At home we spoke only Czech, I don't remember recognizing that it wasn't my father's mother tongue. But it probably wasn't perfect, because in the letters that our parents wrote us to England, you could tell my mother's corrections of my father's grammatical mistakes. But she did it in such a way that it was almost unnoticeable. And there weren't many of them. You could probably tell it from his pronunciation. But at that age I didn't pay attention to it.
I didn't have a bar mitzvah, if I would have wanted it, I could have had it in England, in the Czechoslovak state school we had 'our' Czech Catholic priest and rabbi and a small prayer room. I think that Catholic and Jewish services alternated in it, most certainly he would have gladly prepared me, but I was proud of my atheism. Today I regret it; it belongs to Judaism as inseparably as circumcision, so I feel the poorer for it.
I was at the synagogue one more time, I know the exact date, it was on 1st January 1938, my brother had his bar mitzvah, as the day before he'd turned 13, the age at which a boy enters adulthood, and he was reading from the Torah the prescribed text for that week.
Once a year, on the Day of Atonement, she spent time from morning to the late afternoon hours in the Jubilee Synagogue, that's the one on Jeruzalemska Street, the whole day she'd fast in accordance with religious decrees. With Jews that means not only not eating, but also not drinking.
I experienced a Jewish funeral only once, the funeral of my grandmother from Smichov in 1954. At that time I was taken aback that she was being buried in an ordinary box cobbled together from rough, unfinished planks, at first I was scandalized, I thought that my aunts had wanted to save money on the coffin. Then I realized that it's a Jewish custom expressing the idea that we're all equal at birth and at death.
My grandfather on my mother's side was deeply religious, he attended synagogue daily, morning and evening, to pray, during the Sabbath he stayed there almost the whole day, he was a member of the board of elders of the Smichov synagogue and a member, perhaps even the chairman of the funerary brotherhood, which in Jewish communities take care of the last rites.
He married, had two children and in 1969 immigrated to the United States. After 1989 he came to Prague once with his daughter, she's also Mirjam.
In Modrany he also worked as a locksmith, and then for some time as a technician, so he could finally make use of his education.
He left for Ostrava, worked as a miner underground for two or three years, lived with other brigade members in wooden barracks, so more with the lumpenproletariat than the proletariat, I don't know any more how many of them there were to a room, he had a bed and a small closet, nothing more.
Then for about a half year he was some sort of junior official in the party apparatus. But by then the party purges had begun, suspicious were mainly those that had fought against General Franco in the Spanish Civil War [28], those who had been in England during the war, and as it's been the case for centuries, Jews. My brother satisfied two criteria, so they politely told him that he should go and work among the working class, to get to know it better [29]. Well, it could have also ended up worse, they could have made him into an anti-state conspirator.
When in 1956 the Soviets sent the army into Hungary [30] to suppress the rebellion, it was the proverbial last drop and he left the Party. Back then it was no joke, they summoned him to the committee perhaps ten times and tried to convince him with various 'arguments' to stay faithful to the Party, they were annoyed that a member of the working class was leaving the Party, but he insisted on it, so they finally let him go. He was very stressed out by it.
He started working in Teplice, I don't know why he picked Teplice, maybe because he'd once been there on 'tauschi.' He didn't deny his Communist convictions from his youth, joined the Party, maybe also because he considered it to be our parents' legacy, and was very active. He wanted to blend into the majority of society, and so he changed his name to Pavel Potocky.