In 1939 we moved from the apartment on Tolsteho Street a bit further on, into a building on Bulharska Street, number 17. My parents wisely chose a two-room apartment with a kitchenette. They removed the partition that was there, and so this double bachelor apartment was created. Then when the Germans were going around Prague and picking apartments for themselves, ours didn't seem attractive to them, and this is why we were able to stay in it until the transport.
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Displaying 12151 - 12180 of 50826 results
Martin Glas
Because of the eventual emigration, we had ourselves christened in 1939. The point wasn't for us to rid ourselves of our Jewish identity, but we were led to it by the fact that abroad they liked it more when Christians immigrated, and not Jews. We wanted to increase our chances of being accepted somewhere.
So we stayed here. As long as there was hope that we'd succeed in emigrating, so until the war broke out, we were preparing for it. My father was attending pedicurist lessons, once he even gave me a pedicure as practice. For mother, he did it several times. He bought this beautiful leather briefcase, where he had his tools and some bottles with various tinctures. The briefcase still exists, my children used it for paints, and I still use the clippers for cutting my nails. My mother attended courses at a confectioner's. At that time she was baking a lot at home, to practice.
After the occupation, when my father realized that England and France had abandoned us after all, he himself tried to find a way out. At the American consulate he found out that thanks to his being born in Terst, the Americans had included him in the Italian quota. We could have moved out of the country immediately, but we didn't have enough money for the security deposit.
An interesting chapter was the possibility of our emigration. We could have saved ourselves, because in the fall of 1938 my mother was in England visiting her sister, Aunt Heda, who had emigrated there with her family in the spring of that year. When she was crossing the border, a border official started a conversation with her, my mother knew English fairly well. He told her to not return home, that it would end up badly here. But she said that she had her family in Prague. So he told her to go, get her family and return to England, that we could live there. She objected, that we weren't rich and that we didn't have anything to live on. He told her that she could work in England. And really, later she realized that she had gotten a work permit in her passport. At home she showed the permit to my father, but he said: 'I'm not going to let my wife support me, that's out of the question. England and France won't abandon us.
, but the thing that had the worst impact on me was that I wasn't allowed to attend school. However - if children would have kept on playing with me, it wouldn't have been so terrible. But I ended up alone. I couldn't go out into the street, because there my former friends yelled: 'Smelly Jew!' at me, and that I didn't care for. When the guys turned their backs on me, some girls let me play with them for another few days. Suddenly they lost interest, girls are simply like that. But back then I got very upset at them, because suddenly I was completely alone.
One more outing has stuck in my mind, this one was just me, my father and my brother. I might have been around nine, because at the age of ten I was already not allowed into the forest, and when I was eleven I went to Terezin. On this outing I wanted to pick some dandelions or something like that for my mother. My father and brother were telling me that the flowers would wilt, for me to throw them away, why bring my mother wilted flowers. I didn't listen to them and brought them to my mother anyways. She was delighted, because she knew I'd done it of my own accord; she put them in water and the flowers revived. Suddenly she had a fresh bunch of flowers at home. It's possible that at that time Jews weren't allowed to buy them. Actually, we weren't allowed to do anything, absolutely nothing. Just drink water, breathe and eat food from a small ration [12].
But I do remember one outing very well. At that time we were still allowed into the forest, so our whole family was there. My father didn't bring any games with him, but for lunch we had two hard-boiled eggs, one with a light-colored shell and the other with a dark one. So my father took a napkin, drew a board on it like for checkers or chess, broke pieces off the eggshells for figures, and we played checkers.
In 1935, the bank where my father worked went bankrupt. My father found himself out of work. With difficulty he managed to find work as an accounting inspector for the Omnia company. Then he was often on business trips and thus away from home. From that time on, we weren't as well off as before. When I began attending school, my mother bemoaned the fact that while my brother had always gotten ham with his lunch for school, I only got bread with butter and an apple. She felt sorry for the fact that she couldn't also provide it to me. I actually didn't care one way or the other.
Thanks to our homeroom teacher Korda, I became a Czech. Always when we were going over something, he stood beside me and translated every word into German for me. At first I didn't understand my classmates at all, and so that 'I wouldn't be afraid,' for perhaps 14 days my mother sat in the desk next to me - to this day I can see her there in my mind. At the end of Grade 1 I already knew Czech, and along with the other children, how to read and write.
I don't remember Yom Kippur or other Jewish holidays. I can't say that we were brought up in any particularly Jewish fashion. I know some stories from the Old Testament, but we never used to go to synagogue with our parents, for example. From 1939 onwards I was a Roman Catholic, because to make emigration easier we had ourselves christened, and then we celebrated Christmas; at that time I was eight.
One Jewish holiday we celebrated was Chanukkah. Dad would put on a hat, open the prayer book and read something from it. He knew how to read Hebrew, but whether he also understood it, that I don't know. He probably read the text aloud, but I don't know exactly. We, my brother and I, would just stare off into space, because we didn't understand it. The only thing on our minds was how much longer before we got presents.
For my part, I never envied my brother; maybe he later envied me my education. He himself only graduated from junior high school, after that he wasn't allowed to attend school [10].
My childhood is divided into a German and a Czech period. During my early days I was raised in German, and didn't learn Czech until I started Grade 1. Then I on the other hand almost forgot German. This change, the switch to another language, was a major dividing line for me. This is why I've got the German and Czech periods sharply separated in my memory. I don't know German fairy tales, or more likely don't remember them.
Life in a sublet, where they lived in the beginning, must have been misery for her. It was somewhere in Strasnice with some widow, who managed to create unbearable conditions for my parents. At my mother she used to yell: 'Smelly Jewess from a Jewish street!', despite she herself being Jewish, and as opposed to my mother, who had a bit of that Aryan blood in her, also looking Jewish. My mother could no longer stand it there, and when she could, she used to go around to post offices and libraries so that she'd be around her as little as possible.
They were married in 1920, and moved to Prague, because my father's bank opened a branch office there. My father progressed in his career, and worked his way up to the position of managing clerk. My mother was at home, and didn't work, even when she was offered a position in some chemical factory. She would have apparently earned even more than my father, which he, being an old-school type, couldn't allow. And so my mother, out of love for my father, stayed at home and became a 'kitchen- maid' - as she used to say.
Melitta Seiler
I was involved in the Jewish community, I liked to pay visits to the community's office, or take some cookies there, at least until last year, when I had a severe heart attack and almost died.
I receive a pension from the Germans, not very big, but it helps.
I'm not sure things got better, but they have certainly changed. Of course, it's a relief to be allowed to say what you think, not to stay in a queue for three eggs for five hours and then not get them, and I was lucky with a certain law, which acknowledges that we were deported and gives us some advantages: 12 free train tickets, free radio-TV subscription, free bus tickets, and some free medicine, plus a small pension. But the dirt in the streets, the lack of civilization I see, and the anti-Semitism are all more often seen.
I was happy when the Revolution of 1989 broke out, I hoped for better times, but my father was dying, my mother as well, so it was a black period for me. I saw all the events on TV, because I didn't go outside: I could hear shots and I was afraid.
Erika didn't sit shivah and she didn't go in mourning either.
My father died in 1989, it was during the revolution [the Romanian Revolution of 1989] [22], and my mother died six weeks after him, in 1990. They were both buried in the Jewish cemetery. Because of the troubled times, I couldn't bring a rabbi or a chazzan for my father's funeral, there was just a minyan and somebody recited the Kaddish, but when mother died, I phoned Bucharest and they sent a chazzan to recite the prayer. I keep the Yahrzeit, I don't know the date after the Jewish calendar, but I light a candle on their birthdays and on the days they died. I was in mourning for 14 months after my parents, one year for each of them; even my underwear was black - that was the custom in Bukovina. I sat shivah for eight days after they died, I kneeled in a corner on the bare ground and cried, and after eight days I called my sister and we went round the house.
I went to Israel in 1983 as well, back to the Sterns. Then I went to visit Edward and Alice, who were living in her apartment back then; one time was in 1997 and the other last year.
I was very impressed with everything I saw in the Israeli museum. All my friends spoiled me, and I was very touched that people weren't afraid of speaking their mind, of meeting in the street, of the living conditions.
They originally came from the Czech Republic, but they fled the country to escape Hitler when they were still very young. They were young, in their twenties, when that happened, and they ended up in India, were they both fought in the 9th Hebrew legion, led by Moshe Dayan [18].
I've been to Israel several times, even before 1989. In 1975 I went to visit some friends of mine. There was one family, doctor Stern and his wife, Jews from Brasov, who had left for Israel some time ago, in 1954, I think.
I was happy to hear about the birth of the State of Israel, in spite of all the obstacles and hostile policies towards Jews I'd seen during those years.
Edward works as a wood engineer at a good company, although he had to find a new job recently because the company he worked for fired people and he was among them. But he quickly found another job, an even better one.
He settled in Beer Sheva, and in the same year, he met Alice. She was a Sephardi Jew; she worked in a bank. Edward's savings were 50 dollars, and he went to the bank to see how he could invest the money, and that's how they met. They married the following year, in 1987.
In 1986, he came to my office, and he said, 'Mama, sit down. I decided to emigrate to Israel, and please remember what you promised!' So as hard as it was to let my only child go away, I did. His father didn't approve at all, but Edward's mind was all made up, and within six months, I think, he was gone. I didn't want to join him, I had my friends here, my life, and he was just getting started.