Shlomo Kidron

My parents Karel Kauders and Charlotte Frankl, daughter of Abraham Frankl and granddaughter of Jakob Frankl, probably first met around 1912. They got married and lived in Prague where my sister Yehudit was born on 3^rd January 1914.

A few months later the first world war started and my father was enlisted into the Austrian army, mother moved with my sister to a village in Silesia, Spilendorf, near the town Freudental. I don’t know whether my maternal grandfather moved with them or was there already, and the reason for their move to that village. My father served for several months on the Serbian front. He was then mildly injured from a bullet to the arm, and was transferred to a clerical job in the army (accounting or the quartermaster store, somewhere in Poland). Perhaps this is the reason for my mother’s move to the village in Silesia which was closer to the Polish border. 

From this period I am familiar with an event my father used to talk about. It was forbidden to move goods, especially any food items, from one region to another, although, or perhaps because, there was a shortage in a certain item or other. In one of his holidays, my father took a pack of butter. At the border checkpoint he was asked: “What do you have in your rucksack?”

My father answered: “Butter.” And laughed.

The customs official got angry and shouted: “Don’t make such stupid jokes.” And he sent him on his way without opening the rucksack. 

At the end of the war, my father worked as an accountant in a small town near the village where they lived and after about two years my parents moved to Teplitz-Schoenau (Teplice-Sanov) in Sudetenland, in north-west of the Czech Republic’ where my grandfather’s brother, Moritz Frankl lived. He was a bachelor, or a widower in his sixties and owned a flat. It seems there was a shortage in housing, and my parents’ financial situation was not very good, and thus four people – my parents, my grandfather, and my six-year-old sister – moved in to live in with my grandfather’s brother. It was a small two-rooms flat with a kitchen in the old Jewish quarter in town. I was born there on 20 February 1923. 

My father got a job as an accountant for a business selling fashion and fabric in the city’s main square, which at the time was considered a big firm. He remained in that job until we left the city, following the Sudetenland crisis in 1938. The company had branches in nearby towns. My uncle Rudolf, my father’s brother, managed one of those branches for several years in the city of Bruex, today Most. Frequently, my father would travel to cities in the Sudetenland as well as to the capital Prague to collect debts or to represent the firm in court on financial lawsuits. He knew well the laws and regulations on these matters and it was said about him that ‘he had the head of a lawyer.’

As I’ve mentioned before, in his youth my father was an excellent chess player. In later years, he stopped playing chess and used to play Taroky. This is a card game that my father claimed is more difficult and more interesting than bridge. Twice a week, the gentlemen Taussig, Kauders and Kuechler would meet in the ‘Golden Boat’ café and play Taroky. They would play for very small sums of money, just to make it interesting, and my father, who was an excellent player, would often win and then say: ‘today I earned the coffee and cake I had at the café.’

When he came back from the café on Saturday nights he would bring a slice of chocolate cake for me and two slices of date cake for my mother and sister, and we’d eat them with pleasure on Sunday mornings. 

As I’ve written already, my father loved the opera, though he had no formal musical education. He knew many part of operas by heart. I was told that he would take in his hand the libretto of Carmen and could sing the entire opera, from beginning to end. My mother also loved music and singing very much, and she had a beautiful soprano voice. We had a gramophone that my father would put together. It was considered a very good one for its time. Naturally, it was manual and operated by winding a spring. Electronic record players did not exist then. All the records were short-play, 78rpm. We had a collection of about 700 records, mostly opera. Works by Verdi, Puccini, Mozart were part of our household, and all of us, including the 6 or 7 years old boy I was then, knew by heart long musical pieces. The great opera singers of those days: Caruso, Gigli, Selyavin, Galli-Curci and others were admired. But the idol of the family was the tenor Leo Slezak. His portrait (photo?) was hanging on a wall in one of the rooms and our collection included dozens of records of his singing. I myself heard him in a recital concert of songs by Schubert and the operetta ‘Die Fledermous’ in the spa town of Marienbad, where I stayed for a summer holiday camp when I was ten or twelve.  

Here is the place to tell a beautiful and moving story about my parents. My mother expressed a wish to hear one more time Slezak performing live. As her fortieth birthday approached, my father went to see a local impresario and suggested that he’d invite Slezak for a recital in our city. The impresario refused, saying that Slezak was too expensive and rather old and he wasn’t sure he would attract a big enough audience. 

My father said: ‘Look, I don’t have the license to produce art event and I cannot afford to do so. You arrange it, and if there are going to be losses, I will cover them all myself. If there will be profit, we will share it 50-50. The impresario agreed, Slezak was invited, the concert hall was full, my parents sat in the front row, and my mother had a wonderful birthday present. And on top of that, my father also made a profit. 

From the records, I learned to know and to love many operas, and I knew many arias and duets off by heart. I remember that when I was five or six and went to a summer holiday camp in the village of Lichtovice near the river Elbe, they would put me on the table and I would sing arias to all the other campers. When I was 8 or 9, my mother took me to a recording company that was visiting our city and paid for a recording of me singing the suicide aria from Verdi’s Othello. My mother proudly kept that record, although it sounded rather awful. 

On Sundays our family had a usual outing. We’d go to the matches of the local team T.F.K Teplitzer Fussballklub, which was in the national top league. My father was a member of the management. We had a regular booth, number 4 in the upper gallery. My parents, my sister and I sat there every week, we got excited, we cheered the successes of the team and were sad when it lost. For my tenth birthday I got a certificate which read: ‘For your birthday, we are sending you a free entry ticket to all our team events.’ I still have that certificate today. 

I only found later that my mother was not pleased with the excessive money my father invested in the team and I’m afraid that both the family booth and my birthday certificate were purchased by my father for a big sum of money. In 1937-8, the team was relegated to the second league and most of the management team, many of them Jews, resigned and a new pro-Nazi management was set up. My father also resigned from any engagement with the team in that year. 

Today when I see the famous Italian Juventus FC playing on TV, I am reminded of having seen Juventus play in Teplitz in 1934, as part of the inter-state cup Mitopacup. Maybe I am one of the few or only person in Israel who has seen Juventus play in those days. 

Childhood and youth

In 1929, when I was six years old, we moved out of the old Jewish quarter and the small flat to a different area, near the Schoenaur Park, to live at 18 Richard Wagner Street. The house was named Villa Arnesen. The house had a garden and a big courtyard. There were five rooms in the flat and the rent was high, but apparently we could afford it from the modest pension of my grandfather and his brother who moved with us to the new house. 

We rented out one of the rooms to a tenant and with his rent money we could hire a house maid, but in 1933 during the great global financial crisis, my father received a letter which said something like: ‘We regret that we will no longer be able to pay you a salary of 3000 crowns a month, and therefore we have no choice but to fire you. We will be able to re-employ you with a monthly salary of 2000 crowns.’

In the meantime, my grandfather and his brother passed away, one after the other. We, my parents, my sister and I moved to a three and a half room flat in the city centre, at 16 Frauengasse, near the Protestant church, not far from the great synagogue. Near our house was a branch of the Nazi party, S.D.P which began to flourish in those days. After I completed one year at the Jewish pre-school in town, my parents sent me to a state primary school. Although there was a Jewish school in the city, they did not send me there on the pretext, or reason, that the Jewish school was far from our home. At the time, the state offered nine years of free and compulsory schooling. After completing primary school, one could choose to move to the gymnasium or a vocational school for another 7 or 8 years, with gradual tuition fees. My parents decided to send me in year five to a Czech school, so I would learn the language, as at home (and in most of the city) we spoke German. But even in the Czech school I didn’t learn much Czech, because apart from the teacher, all the children spoke, or at least understood German. I learnt to speak Czech in about two months, when I spent, during that same year time in a sanatorium in a  Czech resort for children in the Tatra mountains in Slovakia. In those years I often suffered from colds and angina and I was therefore sent to this sanatorium together with my cousin Eva who suffered from asthma. Despite the beautiful views and the reasonable living conditions, I didn’t feel well being there. It was the first time for me being away for an extended period from my parents’ home. I didn’t like the food and I resented the fact that we were served porridge when at the same time the carers and teachers ate sausages.

I didn’t manage to meet up much with my cousin, as boys and girls were separated. I didn’t build new friendships with the other children (ages 6-14), possibly because of the language barrier, except for one boy. His name was Jarmil Burghauser. We shared an interest in music. We talked about opera and he told me what he wanted to compose and how he would do it. After the sojourn in the sanatorium, we no longer stayed in touch. A few years ago I found his name in a Czech music magazine, where he was mentioned as a composer and music critic. 

I had a special tie to my cousin Eva. My uncle Rodulf, my father’s brother and my aunt Milly, who was a friend of my mother’s before either was married, lived with their two daughters Hannah and Eva in a nearby town Breux (today Most). Every two or three weeks we would travel to see them or they would come to visit us, we also went on summer camps together. It was like a childhood love (we’re talking about ages 3-8). After her father died from illness, and aunt Milly with her two daughters moved to Prague, we hardly kept in touch, except for a short period before I made Aliya, when we stayed in Prague. Eva and her mother were murdered in Auschwitz in 1943, whereas the older sister Hannah (renamed in Israel as Shuli) made Aliya. 

My father had two more brothers who had families of their own, one in Prague and one in Eger (today Cheb). My mother, too, had several relatives. We only had brief contact with them. I do remember one unusual episode: my uncle Victor, my father’s younger brother, was a traveling merchant of sweets. Every couple of weeks he would arrive in our city, and would spend the night with us. One time, I remember, he sighed and said: ‘Ach bei der Lotti feuhl ich mich zu hause’ (At Lotti’s – my mother’s nickname – I feel at home). He said this not only because his troubled relationship with his Christian wife. In later years I heard often, from different people, many praises for the warm welcome and homeliness that my mother showed our guests. 

After primary school I moved to study in the gymnasium. The school were very conservative, probably a result of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, from which the Czech Republic departed in 1918. We addressed all our teachers as ‘Herr Professor,’ though not all of them had the academic credentials. Most of the teachers also addressed us, already at the age of 11-12 with the German form of politeness ‘sie’ rather than the more common ‘du’. 

I remember once speaking up to a maths teacher, insisting (falsely) that there was a mistake in the equation he was trying to teach us, and he reproached me saying: Kauders, sie freche wanze sie! (Kauders, you small bedbug, sir).

In the attic of the gymnasium, whose building, by the way, was beautiful and impressive, there was a small room called the Karzer, a detention room for students who misbehaved. By the time I was at school the room was no longer in use, but often a student who did not fulfil all his duties was told to stay alone at the end of the school day under a teacher’s supervision to complete his homework and special exams. 

The atmosphere at school is well described, though perhaps exaggerated, in the novel ‘Young Greber’. Unfortunately, I can’t remember the author’s name. This is not to say that the atmosphere at school was of anxiety and fear, but of distance between teachers and students, meant to achieve a regime of obedience and discipline, though it didn’t always succeed. Our class was divided to A and B. In A class were boys and girls who were Catholic or Protestant. In B class the students were Catholics or Jews. The reason for this division, we were told, was the RE classes that each group had separately. 

There were 32 students in our class, 12 of them were Jewish, 4 girls and 8 boys. One must remember that my first year at the gymnasium was 1934, about a year after the Nazis came to power in Germany, and a rising nationalism among the German population in the Sudetenland. In our class the relationship between the non-Jews and the Jews were still fair, but there was no close affiliation between the different groups. I can’t remember ever visiting the home of one of the Christian students, and they were not close friends with us. 

But among the Jewish students there were close friendships. Four of them were very close friends of mine. We would walk to and from school together, do our homework together, usually in my house. My mother would prepare afternoon snack for everybody: bread and butter, a glass of milk or tea. After our homework we’ll pass the time together cycling, playing ball, at the swimming pool in town, rowing on the late which was about a 30-minutes bike ride away. In the winter we would ice-skate or ski. On the holydays or on the weekend, if there were no football matches in town, we would go on longer bike rides in summer, and in the winter we’d travel to the mountains for ski. Sometimes we’d go to the central promenade in town, the Korso, walk up and down and comment on the men and women we passed on the way. 

Sadly, I think I am the only one alive from all five of us. Two were murdered during the Holocaust, one immigrated to South America and I’ve lost touch with him, and my closest friend Franz Heller managed to immigrate with his family to England, where he married, had a family and made a good living, but died at the age of 50 from cancer. I only kept in touch, by post, with him and we even met twice. Once, when he visited Israel and the second time in 1971 when I spent three days in London. He came from Newcastle, where he lived, to meet me there. 

Of the four Jewish girls in our class I know of two of them that live today in Israel. 

Our house was a secular Jewish home, but not completely assimilated. My maternal grandfather, who lived with us, kept the Jewish tradition in his way. He regularly attended synagogue, on Shabbat and Holydays and often also on weekdays. He would buy Etrog and Lulav for succot, and fast on Yom Kippur, but did not wear a kipa and didn’t grow a beard. I remember he once cut himself shaving on the morning of Yom Kippur and said, ‘you see, one mustn’t shave on Yom Kippur.’ 

We did not keep a kosher diet. We enjoyed eating bacon and Hungarian salami on a buttered slice of bread. But for Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur my mother would buy a goose and the food during the holydays was festive. My mother would melt and goose fat and keep it in a big clay pot, and for months we would eat bread with goose fat. My father went to the synagogue several times a year, mostly during the holydays. To say Kadish over his parents. My mother did not go with him. She used to say: ‘If Hitler exists – God doesn’t.’

The only holyday we celebrated at home was Hanukkah. We lit the candles and sang ‘Maoz tzur’. Pessach was only marked by a box of matzos. For breakfast my father would have matza with his coffee instead of a bread roll. For the Seder, my sister and I would be invited to friends’ houses or to the house of the Rabbi of the non-orthodox community, my mother’s undle Rabbi Dr Friedrich Mordecahi Weiss. I remember the Seder is his house as a beautiful and cultured experience. 

My sister and I went to synagogue on Friday nights. I don’t think the motivation was genuine religious fervour. My sister Yehudit was then already active in the Zionist movement, and wanted to get closer to Judaism in some way. Also, Friday nights in the synagogue were festive and beautiful, and it was also a great musical experience. The choir, the organ and the tenor voice of the cantor, as he turned towards the congregation to bless over the wine and sing ‘Lecha Dodi,’ all created a true atmosphere of Shabbat. 

More on members of the family

Most of my family was murdered in the Holocaust, among them: my father’s brother Gustav who lived in Prague with his wife and two sons. 

My uncle Victor, my father’s younger brother, left his non-Jewish wife and their two sons during the Sudetenland crisis in 1938, moved to Prague and from there he was deported by the Germans to Auschwitz, where he was murdered. His wife and his sons survived. After the war, they went back to their hometown, but were deported to Germany by the Czech regime, for being ‘German’. They lived in Harlingen and married non-Jewish wives. Their children are also considered to be completely German, although they carry the family name Kaudros, a Jewish name. 

Carl, uncle Victor’s youngest son, passed away in the early ‘80s. I corresponded for a while with his brother, my other cousin, Gustel, until I no longer received replies to my letters, not from him nor from any member of his family. I assume he passed away. I know he was very ill. 

As I’ve mentioned before, my cousin Eva and her mother were sent to Auschwitz in 1943, whereas her sister Hannah, who was an active member of the Zionist youth movement ‘blue and white, immigrated to Israel in 1940 illegally. I will say more about her later. 

Rabbi Dr. Friedrich Mordechai Weiss, Rabbi of the Liberal (non-Orthodox) Jewish community of Teplitz, was a half-step uncle of my mother. He was the youngest son of my maternal grandfather Israel Weiss from his second wife, and was only two or three years older than my mother. He too immigrated with his family to Israel on a ship of illegal migrants (ma’apilim) and lived for many years in Jerusalem in poverty. When he asked to be recognised as a rabbi for pension payment, he was asked in Yiddish: ‘eir zeit e reb? Vi is der bort?’ (you’re a Rabbi? Where’s the beard?). 

So he grew a long white beard and he received a pension. 

He is no longer alive today. In the final years of his life, he lived with his wife in a nursing home in Haifa. 

Israel Weiss, my maternal grandfather had 18 (!!!) children. Five of them died (apparently) in infancy. His first wife, Charlotte Stresser died after giving birth to six or more children, among them my maternal grandmother Julia, who died before my mother got married. I have two letters from 1846 that Israel Weiss wrote to his future wife (love letter?). 

Another relative, my mother’s step-cousin, also lived in Teplitz with her family, and she and my mother were friends. She and her family were murdered in the Holocaust, all but her eldest daughter who made Aliya and was among the founders of Kibbutz Kfar Rupin, where she lives to this day. 

With other more distant relatives we had very little contact. I don’t know of their whereabouts and I assume most of them perished in the Holocaust and others, being my parents’ age, are no longer among the living. 

My sister Yehudit (z”l)

Edith, as was her name before she moved to Israel, was 9 years my senior. She had an important influence on my life. I remember her babysitting me when I was very young. Later, when I was taking piano lessons, from the age of 8 till 10, she often sat by my side and ‘supervised’ me. I didn’t like music practice and this might be the reason why I stopped getting lessons. Although the main reason was probably the cut to my father’s salary in 1933. Edith was the one to take me along with her to the synagogue on Friday nights and got me closer to Judaism, not to religiosity, and later on to Zionism. She tried to teach me Hebrew. I think I got up to lesson number 20 in the Hebrew primer book. Anyway, when I got to Israel I already has some basic Hebrew. It was because of her that I joined for a while the youth movement ‘blue and white’, including one summer camp. Generally speaking, she was more influential than my parents in my education in the spiritual sense and in building my sense of self and my opinions. Eventually, in the crucial period of 1938-39, it was due to her influence and pressure that my parents registered me for Youth Aliya. It is very possible that were it not for her, I would have stayed in the Czech Republic with my parents and my fate would have been the same as their bitter fate in the extermination camps. Therefore I can say that to a great extent I owe my life to my sister. 

Edith was born in Prague, but her early years, the years of the Great War, she spent in a small village in Silesia, where she attended the first year of school. After the war in 1920 or 21, when the family moved to Teplitz, she continued primary school and then moved to the gymnasium, where she studied for four years, before moving to study for two years in a school for commerce. After her studies, she worked as a secretary, a clerk and an accountant in a stationary shop, in a lawyers’ firm and eventually, for four and a half years, in a firm for gas heaters and similar appliances. I have a letter written by the manager of that firm. The letter is full of praise for her work as an accountant, and for correspondence in various languages: German, Czech, English. In the letter, he praises her accuracy, her memory and responsibility. 

At the same time she grew interested in the Zionist movement and became active. In our town there was a rather big and active branch of the Zionist movement. Jacob Edelstein lives and was active for several years in Teplitz (see Ruth Bondy’s book Elder of the Jews). 

The Zionist parties, ‘Workers of Zion’, ‘General Zionists’, the right-wing ‘Jewish State party’ and the revisionists were all represented in our town. There were two youth movements, ‘blue and White’ and ‘Young Maccabi’ as well as the sport organisation Maccabi. There was also a WIZO branch. Edith served for a  while as a volunteer secretary for WIZO, and afterwards established a branch of ‘Young WIZO’ and managed it. In 1937 she travelled to the Zionist Congress in Switzerland, paying her own expenses, and after her return she organised lectures in Teplitz and surrounding towns on the topic: ‘About the Congress’. 

In August 1939, when the Czech Republic was already under German occupation, Edith participated in a Hebrew seminar in the Halutz centre in Prague and got a certificate of an advance Hebrew language instructor. In those years, especially after the German occupation, the possibilities for immigration to any country and particularly to Palestine were very slim. There were two types of immigration certificates: one for active members in the Zionist Movement, unless their stay in Europe was not deemed essential by other members; the other – for the rich, people who had in their possession a minimum of £1000 – a substantial sum in those days. Single people were not given a certificate, so a rich single man would be matched to a female Zionist activist. In such a fictive arrangement, Yehudit married a wealthy bachelor by the name of Dankner in a civil ceremony, since the Rabbi who knew that this marriage was not genuine, refused to marry them. Thus, Yehudit made Aliya in December 1939 in the last legal transport to leave the Czech Republic – it was wartime already – and she arrived in Israel on January 2, 1940, one day before her 26^th birthday. She and her ‘husband’ separated as soon as they arrived in Israel. A formal divorce was arranged later. I will write about Yehudit’s life in Israel later. 

Years of crisis

The Republic of Czechoslovakia was established at the end of World War I, following the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. Its borders with the new and renewed states: Poland, Romania, Hungary and Austria, where decided in agreements, whereas the border with Germany on the north and west was the same as in the time of the monarchy. Along this border ran the Sudetenland, with a population of about 3 million almost all of them German speakers. They were considered an ethnic minority in the state of Czechoslovakia. 

The Sudetenlad was a region rich in natural resources: coal, uranium – which was not deemed as useful then as it is nowadays – and springs of thermal water of various types in the cities Karlsbad, Marienbad, Franzenbad and Teplitz, my home town. 

From the onset there was a problem with the make-up of the population in this democratic state. It comprised of about 8 million Czech, 5 million Slovaks, about 3 million Germans and others – Hungarians, Ukranians, Romanians, and of course Jews made up 1 or 2 million. 

Until 1933, the year when the Nazis rose to power, the national aspirations of the various ethnic groups did not clash. Slovakia’s demand for an autonomy (today it is an independent state) was rather minor, and the Germans in the Sudetenland achieved a lot in many ways. Culture, education and commerce continued mostly in German. They were represented in Parliament, in the German social-democratic party, which existed alongside a Czech social-democratic party. The communist party, which was rather strong then, was joint for Czech and German. The German national party was until then very small. But after the Nazis came into power in Germany, the party quickly grew and in the municipal election of 1936 (if I’m not mistaken), this party achieve majority in the cities in the Sudetenland. The name of the party was S.D.P. (Sudethendeutsche Partei). Their slogan was: ‘One people, one state, one leader.’ And their political demand was separation from Czechoslovakia and annexation to the Nazi German Reich. 

The situation became critical already in May 1938. After Germany annexed Austria, it threatened to invade Czechoslovakia and to annex the Sudetenland by force.  Czechoslovakia responded with general mobilization, and since France as well as Romania and Yugoslavia all had a military pact with Czechoslovakia, under their pressure Germany retracted this threat, but achieved in an agreement for an international committee headed by Britain to decide on the fate of the Sudetenland. 

In the summer of 1938 I completed my fourth year in the gymnasium (nine years in total of formal education) and my parents were considering, under my sister influence no doubt, to send me to the Hebrew gymnasium in Munkács, a city in the east of Czechoslovakia and the region knowns as Carpathian Russia. 

There were many Jews in this region and in Munkács, Jews comprised half of the city population, but when they found out that in the Hebrew gymnasium the students were taught English already from year three, whereas in Teplitz until year four, which I have just completed, English wasn’t taught, but Czech and Latin as foreign languages, and therefore it was decided that I would stay in the same school. I was supposed to study English and improve my Hebrew privately, with the option to move to Munkács after a year or two. And so it was that in early September I started my fifth year at the local gymnasium. 

In the middle of the night between September 14^th and 15^th the neighbours woke us up. ‘Germany is about to invade, you better leave the city quickly.’

After a short deliberation, it was decided that my mother, my sister and I will pack suitcases and try to make it to Prague, but my father will stay behind for the time being because of his work commitments, and will try and withdraw the money we had in the local bank. That night and in the following days most of the Jews of the city left and from a community of about 5000 Jews, only a few hundred remained. 

It was very difficult to find a vehicle that night and only through friends of my father, we managed to get an overpriced taxi to take us to Prague. The Germans did not invade the following day, but between September 15^th and 30^th, the British Prime Minister Chamberlain met three times with Hitler. On September 30^th, in the infamous Munich convention, attended by the French Prime Minister Daladier and the Italian dictator Mussolini all four agreed to give the Sudetenland to Germany. Czechoslovakia, who found itself alone, could not resist and gave in. President Beneš resigned and left the country. In his place, a former judge was elected and he reigned as ‘puppet ruler’. The government was changed to pro-German ministers. Chamberlain declared then that he has saved peace, but less than a year later, World War II broke out. 

On October 1^st 1938, the German army marched into the Sudetenland and met with no resistance. As for us, my mother, my sister and I arrived early in the morning of September 15^th to Prague, to the house of my surprised aunt and her two daughters. We lived with them for a while, until we rented a three-rooms flat in Wekwice (?), a suburb in the north-west of Prague, near the final stop of Tram number 23. 

Our family savings were deposited in the municipal bank ‘Peruz and sons,’ whose owners were Jewish. My parents had only a small sum of money in the national Czech bank. Unfortunately, it was impossible to draw that money without a month’s notice. Within a few days the bank was closed and after the German invasion, it was confiscated. I remember my mother’s eyes red from weeping when it became clear that the money was gone. I don’t know how much many we had and today I have no documents relating to it, but these were 25 years of savings, and I am certain it was a substantial amount, which could have kept the family for several years and maybe would enable immigration. 

In the two weeks between our departure from Teplitz and before the German invasion, my mother went back twice and managed to move to Prague most of our furniture and houseware, including the gramophone and the treasured 700 records. It wasn’t easy to find a van to move our belongings. My mother hired one driver who changed his mind half way through the journey, let my mother off the van in a small town en route and then turned around. My mother had to spend the night on a park bench. Drivers demanded high prices, and my mother gave a driver our grand piano as a ‘gift’. I think she also give as payment some of the furniture that she was not able to move to Prague. 

Father stayed in Teplitz for two weeks longer and helped to pack up and move the business where he was employed as accountant, whose owner was also Jewish. When he tried to reach Prague on September 30^th, he found a checkpoint manned by the Czech army along the ‘new border’ between the Sudetenland and Czechoslovakia. Luckily, the Czech officer in charge of the checkpoint knew my father, as they have met before for swapping stamps (my father collected stamps and we had a valuable collection at home). The man let my father pass and thus he arrived to be with us at the very last minute. 

My parents did not involve me – 15.5 years old at the time – with their worries, but I think they had little to live on after I moved to Israel. I know there was a sum of several thousand crowns in the Czech bank, and my father gradually sold his stamp collection, and if I remember correctly he also took occasional jobs as an accountant for Jewish business that had to close. Eventually he also managed to arrange for a small monthly pension payment.

In Prague I did not continue to attend school. My sister Yehudit quickly found her way to the Zionist movement organisations in Prague and she worked there until her Aliya. Initially, my parents were not inclined to give permission for me to make Aliya. My mother ‘didn’t want to let go of her son,’ but Yehudit managed to convince them to register me for ‘Youth Aliya’. And so it is thanks to my sister that I could leave Europe in time. 

‘Youth Aliya’ which until that time existed only in Germany and occupied Austria was now extended to also include Czechoslovakia. It was designed for Jewish youth, aged 15-17 who suffered persecution by the Nazis, and the aim was to bring them to Israel, mostly to kibbutzim. In practice it was organised through Zionist youth movements and coordinated with the British authorities, who authorised the number of entry certificates, which of course was too small with the growing demand. I registered with the youth movement ‘Blue and White’ and attended meeting regularly in a branch in the centre of Prague, near the old Jewish quarter. There I met others my age, who like me came to Prague from cities in the Sudetenland, and others who came to Prague earlier from Germany and Austria. In those meetings and social outings, good friendships formed. I made Aliya with several of them and together we went to Ashdot Yaakov and later on to HaHotrim and they remained close friends for many years, some of them until today. In Prague I also got in touch with two of my friends from Teplitz and we continued to meet up until I left for Israel. One of the two was murdered in the Holocaust, the other manage to immigrate to England with his family. 

The journey from our house to the centre of Prague was long (over an hour by foot). I usually took the tram, sometimes I used a bicycle that my mother ‘saved’ for me. I had a lot of free time. I spent a lot of time listening to music. Since childhood I used to listen to records at home and knew many operas and operettas. The local ensemble In Teplitz would often perform an opera, and there were also performances by visiting singers. I have already seen several operas and operettas. It was on one such occasion that I heard the famous singer Richard Tauber who was a guest of the Opera in Teplitz and I still have with me today a note with his signature which I got when I saw him by chance on the street near the theatre. There were many theatres in Prague, including two opera houses. The German Opera House was shut, but the Czech opera continued with its usual programme. I would go almost once a week to the opera. I would buy a ticket for the second gallery, standing, for two crowns, which was cheaper than the retune tram ticket. I prepared myself to these outings, listening at home to the records of those operas again and again, I would read through the libretto, and then I knew fairly well some fifteen different opera, including long sections which I knew by heart, and I remember them to this day. 

Leaving home, and Aliya

In the winter of 1938/9 there was a three-week preparatory campy (hachshara) in Pisakry, near Brno. The camp was for all Youth Aliya candidates from Czechoslovakia for that year. There were several hundred young boys and girls attending, under the guidance of leaders and activists from the youth movements. Aside from maintenance work around the camp, including shovelling snow that was in abundance that winter, there were also Hebrew lessons and different clubs: literature, singing (mostly Hebrew songs which were sang in the youth movement), and others. The main purpose of the camp was to evaluate the suitability of the young candidates to Aliya. There were more candidates than British entry certificates, so it was necessary to disqualify, or at least postpone, a certain percentage of candidates. It was a heavy responsibility for the young leaders who had to decide on disqualifying a candidate. The leaders too were very young and some of them have been instructed by the movement not to move to Israel themselves at this stage although, or rather because, they were central activists in the movement. A few of those who were disqualified and some of the leaders who were asked to stay did eventually make it to Israel in different ways. Others remained, were sent to the camps and some were murdered. 

The date for our Aliya was set for March 18^th 1939. We were each told to prepare one suitcase with basic, initial items, but also a big wooden trunk was bought and was to travel separately and arrive after us. We packed into it whatever we could: clothes and other items, books, souvenirs and personal documents. My parents made an effort to ensure I had everything I needed. I assume it was a financial effort in those days. I took with me ten albums with records, wrapped in a duvet, a total sum of 120 records of my favourite operas. 

The political situation remained tense, also after the annexation of the Sudetenland. A small German minority remained within Czechoslovakia and felt excluded, and Germany used this minority, the weakness of the newly-formed government and Slovakia’s growing demand for independence to continue to threaten the independence of Czechoslovakia. 

On the morning of March 15, the radio announced the invasion of the German army into Czechoslovakia. There was a snow storm the previous night and the field next to our house and the nearby streets were covered in heavy snow. I went into town to find out what is going to happen now. At the branch of the youth movement, I found the leaders busy burning letters and documents. Obviously, our Aliya, which was planned for March 18, could not take place now. I walked all the way back home, because the tram wasn’t running as its route passed near the Czech army headquarters. From there I walked for about half an hour, direction north-west. All along the road stood crowded rows of German soldiers. I heard one of the soldiers say to a man passing by: ‘so, are you surprised that we are here already?’ And, indeed, the German army was quick, organised and well-equipped. 

I don’t know how, but despite everything they managed to arrange our departure for Israel. We left in three groups on the 10^th, the 14^th and the 18^th of April in a train to the port of Trieste and from there on board the ‘Palestine,’ ‘Esperia’ and ‘Jerusalem’ to Israel. Earlier, a group has left via France. 

A week before my departure I went for the last time to the opera Lohengrin by Wagner. German officers sat in the front row. When Lohengrin appears he needs to turn to the king and greet him with the words: ‘Heil Koenig Heinrich!’ (‘Be blessed King Heinrich, may God bless your sword). The singer walked to the front of the stage turned to the front row and with a Nazi salute sang his aria. 

I wasn’t feeling well. I had an untreated bruise on my right arm and it was probably infected and I had fever. I sat down on the staircase (I was on the top gallery with a standing only ticket). The next day the bruise was treated somehow, not thoroughly, but the fever was down. 

I was assigned to be on the first group that left Czechoslovakia on the evening of April 10^th. My parents and my sister walked me to the train and two of my school friends also came to the station. The train was standing there already, I boarded the carriage, stood by the window and joked with my friends, maybe to get my mind off the farewell. But as the train started to move, my mother shouted out my name and cried. My father waved, looking sad. This is the last memory I have of my parents. 

Already on the train I could feel pain in my arm again. I could not enjoy the view of the Alps on the way to Trieste. For the sea journey we had wonderful weather. The sea was calm. On the evening of April 17 we arrived at the port of Tel Aviv, where a few passengers disembarked, and the next morning we approached the port in Haifa. I remember the moving view as we got closer to the port and the sun rose above Mt Carmel. We were taken to the immigrant centre in Bat Galim. A member of kibbutz Ashdot Yaacov was waiting for us there. Everybody travelled on to their destinations, except me. My arm was inflamed and I had fever again. It was decided that I should stay in the centre. The next day I was taken to a doctor’s surgery in Hadar HaCarmel, on HeHalutz St., where a little surprise awaited me. The doctor who treated me was Dr Neubauer, the former head of the Zionist Federation in Teplitz, first familiar face in Israel. The diagnosis was severe infection to the arm (phlegmon), and I was operated on there and then. I had to stay a few more days in the immigration centre in Bat Galim. Twice during the following week I had to travel to the surgery to have my dressing replaced. I was given a bus ticket and I made the journey on my own, without any money, no language, a lonely stranger in a foreign country and a foreign city. I suffered from the heat and was thirty, but I couldn’t even buy myself a drink. 

Everyone left the immigration centre, all except one family with two little children. My arm was better and I had no fever, but I was in very low spirit. At the compound of the immigration centre, there was a water tower. I climbed to the top, lay down on the flat roof and cried: tears of longing, tears of departure from a beloved old homeland, from friends, from my parents and from childhood. A chapter in my life has ended and a new chapter was beginning. 

Four days later, the second group arrived, spent the night in the immigration centre and in the morning travelled to Ashdot Yaakov, and three days later, the third group arrived, and I could finally join them. I arrived at kibbutz Ashdot Yaakov, in the Jordan valley, my new home for the next three years. 

To summarise the years of my childhood I want to quote a passage from a letter that I sent from Ashdot Yaakov in the first months of my stay there to my friend who arrived in England with his family. He knew my address in Israel and we corresponded. The exchange of letters stopped for a few years before of the World War. In his letter he complains about frequent arguments with his parents. I replied to him, ‘even if you argue with your parents, be glad that you are still with them, because you will never have it so good in life as you do at your parents’ home. Nobody will look after you as they do. It is true that I feel well in Ashdot Yaakov, and we are well looked after, but I miss that person who can read everything on my face and will look after all my needs. Nobody, not even the best friend, can take the place and role of parents, of a mother.