Hugo Marom - February 8, 2008
Family II
My mother was a skiing teacher in winter. She was an Olympic swimmer in her youth um, which was very unusual in those days. She was born in Vienna to my grandfather on my mother's side who was a banker and was sent by the bank from Czechoslovakia to Vienna to serve at a, at a branch which he then finally managed. And he...they had no children when they came to Vienna so all the five children...my aunts and uncles...were born in Vienna. So, my mother was born in Vienna to a Czech family, spoke Czech and German and, uh...
What was her name?
Her name was Erna in German...Erna Kubie, K-U-B-I-E and um, in Czech ??? because its...all the Czech names have the "ova" at the end. And um, in, in summer she was a tennis coach, which was also unusual at that time. So, she spent half the year...perhaps a little more than half the year...teaching...coaching tennis. Right down below our house we had a very large park...a public park...which had four tennis courts which were turned into ice skating rinks in the winter. Um, we were, we were three...we were...originally we were three brothers and my oldest brother who passed away from...due to a uh, bone...chicken bone getting stuck in his throat and by the time they got him to hospital he passed away so, we were two of us. My youngest brother, Rudy Meisl, who is...who hasn't changed his name live in uh, lives in Oak...in uh, in uh California...northern part of Los Angeles and he's also spent his life in aviation basically. Um, I'm...I was a...for whatever reason I was...compared to my mother, I was not a sportsman...a natural sportsman as my brother was um, who not only went back to Czechoslovakia with me after the war in 1945 but in 1946 um, nearly all my uncles and aunts had left Vienna in 1938 to go to the United States and they were in Chicago and they wanted us to come...our parents didn't come back from concentration camp. So, they wanted us to go to the United States and I was studying engineering at the time and I had uh, quite a, a good stipendium support...a uh, scholarship which was fully paid and in addition to that I had a very good job teaching English at the secondary school which I attended before, before the war.
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