Hugo Marom - February 8, 2008
Non-Jewish Friends
Let me take you back just for a second.
Yes.
You played soccer...
Yeah.
...you went to a Czech school...
Yes.
...your parents ran boutiques. Did you have non-Jewish friends?
Yes. My father served in the army with...was connected through the army...through the services with the father whose name I don't remember of ??? and he was, he was in the banking business...non-Jew. And um, he passed away and my father took care of his widow. They were in the process of building a country home outside of town...a villa, which exists to this day and a very, very modern to this day building...very unusual style...square block, very modern. And um, he um, finished paying the half of this house for, for the widow and we had...we used the half of the...well, one third of the home. The widow had three children. The polio attacked ??? and Otto and Tonda who was a skiing teacher and the tennis coach and was younger than my mother but they worked together for the same uh, for the same club...both skiing and uh, tennis. And uh, as I was born without any grandfathers and only with one gra...grandmother...both my parent...my uh, paternal grandparents were no longer alive...the Meisls were no longer alive. The only grandmother I had was my mother's mother in Vienna who in 1938 when Hitler came to Vienna because she was Czech she came...and her children had gone to the United States, she was living alone...she came to Brno to live with us immediately when Hitler came in. Czechoslovakia was considered a haven at that time for Jews and so forth. So, in a, in a way Tonda's mother...that is the widow of Mr. ???, my father's friend...became a grandmother and we called her grandmother and we used to spend a lot of time there at weekends to the extent that when the Germans took my parents to Terezín where they spent only four days before they went to Auschwitz or to that area, they came and they picked them up and allowed them to take...I don't know, twenty pounds or twenty kilos, I don't how much exactly, I can't tell you...with them leaving everything as it was. They weren't allowed to take any jewelry or anything like that...leave that place as it was...they came at night.
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