Eva Gärtnerová

* 1937

  • "We wore a Jewish star - I, like girls, when she was after my father, so she wore too - I wore a star too, and the Nuremberg Laws applied to me all because I was not allowed anywhere. Then I wasn't allowed to go to school when I was six, and I got the star when I was six, with the label "Jude", right. I was not allowed anywhere, we could only play in the Jewish cemetery, and it was quite far from the castle, and I always, when I walked to the cemetery because the Germans were passing there, yes, I was so scared, so I wore a doll over the star. "

  • "In the year 38, when the Germans came, we had to leave Ústí, because it was the Sudetenland, so we had to leave. I was from a mixed marriage, my father was a Jew and my mother was German, and because she did not want to break up with my father, we had to leave the Sudetenland and go to Mladá Boleslav, where my father was born. So we then moved to his sister's Jewish school, we lived there and in the year 40 we had to move in, well actually not really move in, we just had to go to the castle, where the Boleslav castle was, where were ... The Jews ....they and the mixed marriages were there ... and we were just locked up there for four years. "

  • Full recordings
  • 1

    Liberec, 21.07.2020

    (audio)
    duration: 44:55
Full recordings are available only for logged users.

She was so afraid of the Germans that she covered the Jewish star with a doll

Father and mother of Eva Gärtnerová - Oto and Erika Singer in Ústí nad Labem. The film dates from the mid-1930s
Father and mother of Eva Gärtnerová - Oto and Erika Singer in Ústí nad Labem. The film dates from the mid-1930s
photo: archiv Evy Gärtnerové

Eva Gärtnerová was born on September 23, 1937 in Ústí nad Labem-Střekov in a mixed marriage of the German Erika and the Jew Ota Singer. In 1938, they had to leave the occupied Sudetenland to Mladá Boleslav, where they had been interned at the local chateau since 1940. In 1943, their father left by transport to Terezín. According to Nazi racial laws, Eve was a so-called Jewish half-breed and had to wear a star. They lived with their mother in Mladá Boleslav. She survived the bombing at the end of the war in the basement. After the war, the family moved to Liberec. Her mother’s German relatives were deported to Germany. In 1947, her father died in a car accident. Two years later, Eva began to visit the renewed Jewish community in Liberec. In 1952, she trained as a shoe saleswoman and then sold shoes all her life. At the time of the Soviet invasion in August 1968, she was on Liberec Square when a tank tore down the arcades of two houses. After her wedding in 1960, she had two daughters. She and her second husband still attend the reconstructed Liberec synagogue.