It took me decades to find the courage to say ‘I am Jewish’.
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Věra Egermayerová was born on 14 August 1940 in Prague to Pavla and Václav Egermayer. Her mother - considered Jewish by the Nazi optics - had to endure all the Protectorate’s anti-Jewish measures, which eventually resulted in her transport to the Terezín ghetto in January 1945. Her father Václav refused to divorce her, which would probably have saved him. The Nazis interned him in November 1944 in Bystřice near Benešov, a camp for men from Czech-Jewish families. Věra Egermayerová also experienced anti-Jewish bullying from an early age. After the imprisonment of both parents, she lived in an orphanage for several weeks, and eventually she, too, had to be transported to Terezín. This happened on 16 March 1945, when she was four years old. In the ghetto she experienced the end of the war, after which she emigrated to New Zealand with her parents and younger brother Pavel (1946-2001) to visit relatives. There she successfully completed her university studies in French and philosophy. Between 1967 and 1968 she was back in Czechoslovakia, and for the next 25 years she worked for the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in Paris. Since 1993, she has established strong ties with the Czech Republic and the local Jewish community. In 2024, she lived alternately in Wellington, New Zealand and Prague.
