Hugo Marom - February 8, 2008
Religious Life
Was your family re...at all religious?
My family, my...first of all going back historically they were all...always there was somebody...some rabbinical connections in the family. My f...the youngest of my father's brother...Renee's father, Walter Meisl, was the best cantors in, in Brno. In fact, he played the piano and for a long time he survived in Terezín because he was in the orchestra that played for the International Red Cross when they came, okay? And he had a very good voice and he sang in the main synagogue, which we did not attend. We attended a normal Orthodox synagogue. My father taught me all...long before we had a Hebrew teacher at school, my father taught me to read Hebrew...not to translate but to read Hebrew like everybody else. And every Friday night we had uh, we lit candles and uh, we had uh, we sang the ??? and all the normal things. And on High Holidays we would spend the whole day and so forth in synagogue. Apart from that my mother believed the best cure for any illness was ??? so she did not keep a kosher home and um, but that was, that was a standard which was more or less a standard of the Czech Jews as opposed to the Slovak Jews and the Jews that came from Carpathian Ruthenia which where my mo...where my wife comes from, okay? Which was much more Orthodox and there were more adherent Jews there than, than...
Where was she from?
My mother...my, my, my wife is from a, from a place called in Czech, Sevluš or Velky Sevluš, which is south of Uzhhorod, which is capital of Carpathian Ruthenia. They went to concentration camp in 1944 and uh, she survived something like five or six camps, went to Auschwitz straight, was very fortunate, was only four days in Auschwitz and was taken to other camps.
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