"There is definitely a different atmosphere in Vienna and there is much greater tolerance. But the Austrian peasants ... Austria was terribly Nazi. More Nazi than Germany. It really was. "" And was it still there at this time? "-" Yes. "-" How did you feel? "-" From various notes the people were making. Salzburg is a very conservative city. And it is historically given. It was not part of Austria, it was an independent city. Something like the Vatican City. Vatican was so small. The princely archbishops ruled there and they influenced the local mentality. It is passed down from generation to generation, such a terrible Catholic conservatism. I then realized there that the fellow swimmers from Bar Kochby ... they had regular meetings in the 80's. They met every three years. For example, they refused when Kurt Waldheim was the President of Austria, so they met in Israel. When we emigrated, in 1988 a meeting took place in Baden-Baden near Vienna. And that's when my dad brought me there. They were utterly horrified to learn that Pal'o Bluma's daughter wanted to stay in Austria. They didn't understand at all, because they had an association with the war when the Austrians were terrible. One Nazi next to another. It was also said that the Germans were excellent soldiers, but bad anti-Semites and the Austrians were bad soldiers and excellent anti-Semites. So they tried to explain to me why not to stay there and how the Austrians behaved in the war and that anti-Semitism is still there. And they were right. But I was terribly upset then, because I chose it and I didn't want to be far from my parents and I thought that Austrians have the same mentality as Czechs. It's a complete mistake. "
"I started looking for a job and worked in Barrandov for a while as a clapper. Then I was a TV production assistant and I was fired from there, and very badly. There were questionnaires where my parents' membership in the party before and after 1968 had to be filled in. And no one stood up for me. I worked in the editorial office of entertainment programs, back then it was in Jindřišská Street and Vladimír Dvořák was the editor-in-chief and Saša Rašilov was in those departments. Nobody stood up for me. They just fired me for my parents. That's when I cried. I considered it a terrible injustice. "
"We could travel as a group of sportsmen. I never knew if it would work again next year, but we used to go skiing to France in winter. There was always someone to protect us so that we could go out. At that time, it was under the auspices of the Ministry of Physical Education and Sport. That does not exist today. At that time, the minister ... maybe just someone from the family, he always did it somehow and it just worked. I could never go out with my dad, we were always divided. And once, in 1980, I drove. Dad wanted me to bring him the magazine Der Spiegel and I brought Kundera's book in French The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Well, they found it at the border in Dolní Dvořiště. They left us there all night, even did a personal search, which was terrible, and they took all our things. Normally they took all our things. They took our bags, everything. This happened in March, and in May they wanted me to collaborate with the State Security. And I was pregnant. I did not cooperate with them. "
"Then they took me to Centrotex. I was studying French already at the grammar school. So they took me to the French department where Gedailovich was. It was the Guy Davids who supplied Tuzex. He was a Jew from Mukachevo who had emigrated in 1948 to Paris and there he created a clothing empire and supplied luxury clothing to Tuzex to Stepanska. There was a shop with his collections. The stetsecs [the State Security officers - trans.] wanted me to sign cooperation. They were interested in him, in the late 1970s. They were interested in the fact that he was going to trade in Moscow. " - "How did you react to that?" - "I'll tell you how it was. I signed it. Because they told me they would take my passport and I already wanted to emigrate then so I really signed it. But I was already pregnant - that was in 1980. I had it written that I had a high-risk pregnancy, which I unfortunately really had, and I disappeared from that Centrotex. So nothing really happened. But I signed it. But I was pregnant, I was 26 years old, I was scared and I was afraid I wouldn't be able to leave. "
"As children, we were so manipulated in that Berlin. These were completely ridiculous situations when we called the mothers of our classmates and friends a 'comrade'. Not 'aunt' or by name. We called them 'comrades'. I also remember one experience. At that time, Ambassador Souček was there. This Souček also appears in Arthur London's book Confessions. He was then the ambassador to Paris. And then he was here, and we made the pioneer promise in his hands. He tied us scarves. And we fought terribly with the East German children. We tore off each other's scarves and hated each other. They had blue scarves. We also had to participate in laying wreaths, in the fall and spring, for liberation. I tied a promise scarf to this event. We had more of them and the one which was tied at the promise was an exceptional scarf. And I remember that an NDR girl came to me, tore it down from me and started tying the blue one to me. And I cried terribly that she destroyed the one from Comrade Souček. That was such an absurdity."
"The Jews, the ones who survived the Holocaust, split in 1948. Divided Jewish society. One half knew it would be an absolute debacle and trouble, because they had already seen the practice in the Soviet Union and emigrated after 1948. The other half of the surviving Jews were completely enthusiastic, fanatical, and building. They believed it would be good. It is also logical from Jewish history. In the diaspora, when Jews began to settle in Europe or elsewhere in the world, they were always somebody special in that country. They were a small minority that was somewhere in the ghettos which had been allocated and where they could live. They have always been the target of some restrictions and hostile attitudes. Because it was the minority. So they were enthusiastic about the idea of socialism and that they would be equal and everyone would be on the same level. It is necessary to understand why so many Jews were still enslaved and pogroms were made, and they hoped for a just society. My parents belonged to this half of those enthusiastic builders. And they meant it really honestly. "
Kateřina Blumová, formerly Borská, was born in Prague on July 13, 1954. Her mother Růžena was Czech, her father Paľo Blum (after the war he used the surname Borský) came from a Hungarian-Austrian Jewish family and grew up in Slovakia. His father’s parents and relatives died in concentration camps, he himself was taken in the 6th Jewish Battalion to a labor camp in Sered in Trnava region. From there he fled to the guerrillas, then got to the USSR to Svoboda’s army, fought in the Slovak National Uprising. After the war he graduated from university and worked in Czechoslovakian diplomatic services. Catherine’s mother hid Jewish girls during the war and worked in the guerrilla resistance. Thanks to her father’s diplomatic missions, Kateřina spent her childhood not only in Prague, but also in Italy and the then German Democratic Republic. After the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968, her father was expelled from the Communist Party and fired from job, her mother was expelled from the Communist Party and later fired from job as well. Kateřina graduated from high school in 1973, but did not go to university for political reasons. Due to unfavorable background report, she was also fired from Czechoslovak Television, where she worked as a production assistant. Later, she received work from the director Jiří Kotalík in the National Gallery in the press department. In the 1970s, she also worked at Centrotex, where the State Security wanted to use her for cooperation in 1979. At that time she was already pregnant and together with her husband was planning to emigrate. Fearing that the State Security would take her passport and prevent her from traveling, she signed the cooperation, but left Centrotex prematurely and no cooperation was possible to realize. She, her husband and their young son emigrated to Austria in 1987 and settled in Salzburg. Kateřina studied philology in Austria and worked at the University of Salzburg at the Faculty of Law as a clerk in Erasmus study program. In 2005, she left to work as a freelance translator from German to Czech. She moved back to the Czech Republic in 2014. All her life, she was engaged in sports, just as her father devoted herself to swimming and skiing. She is interested in Jewish issues and has maintained contacts with many interesting friends of Jewish descent.
Meeting with classmates from the language primary school (special class during the totalitarian era - German and French classes) in Ostrovní Street, Prague, October 2022
Meeting with classmates from the language primary school (special class during the totalitarian era - German and French classes) in Ostrovní Street, Prague, October 2022
