Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

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Hugo Marom - February 8, 2008

Do you remember Masaryk?

I uh, I never m...never saw him. I never saw him but I remember very clearly the time when he passed away. There were uh, they uh, they built a uh, a sort of monument at school. I do remember certainly something very interesting. The morning prayers in the elementary school...now in our...I was...there were two Jewish boys in the...in my class of about thirty students...I can't remember exactly the number. I remember the teacher's name, his name was ???, he was the prime teacher. And uh, when he walked into class, the whole class got up...all boys. The girls were in the floor up above, where my cousin Renee...who is still alive but she was the only one that survive the concentration camps. He walked in, the class would get up and I can't remember exactly the words of the prayer but the prayers were intended to be able to be read to all four religions, which were in this classroom. We had Catholics, Protestants, Greek Orthodox and Jews, okay? More or less, with two Jewish boys...a boy called ??? who went to Palestine. He is not longer alive in 1939. Uh, and uh, the prayer would go something like this, "We pray to our only god to um," the main point I would pick up, it was a standard prayer and everyone would say it aloud, "May God uh, take care of our parents. May he take care of Tatíček Masaryk," Tatíček is a, is a diminutive of father. Father Tatíček Masaryk, "and may he protect us...this God...from the Hungarians and the Austrians and the Germans." Every morning this same prayer so it's a very nationalistic atmosphere which I grew up in. Very, very keen on watching sports starting with soccer of course, ice hockey...the Czech ice hockey team was always very, very good in Europe and so forth...