Karla Katschnerová-Loevensteinová

“(You father was of Jewish origin?) My grandfather was of Jewish origin, and his name was Arnošt Loevenstein. He married a woman from the Richter family from Hradec. Her family owned a textile shop on the Grand Square in Hradec. When my grandfather wanted to marry this Ludmila, her father told him that he would allow her to marry him, but that grandpa would need to be baptized, because they were a religious family. Grandpa thus later became baptized. One Jew later told me that grandpa had had to love her very much if he had agreed to be baptized. The whole family then continued in the Catholic tradition, and they did not care about the Jewish faith at all. (…) People often thought that he was a Jew just because of his name. Nobody enquired whether he was a Jew or a half-Jew. Naturally, when Germans came and I was in the boarding school in Switzerland, my mother insisted that I stay there and do not come back. I was a little over fifteen, and I wanted to return home at all costs. (…) At the beginning before the Nuremberg laws the ‘quarter-Jews’ were not affected. If it had taken longer, perhaps we would have been affected as well, just as it happened to some mixed Jewish families.”

“The Swiss were very strict about allowing somebody to live or work there. (…) If we had stayed there a bit longer, perhaps we would have received housing the official way. But my husband was keen to get out of Europe. Brazil gave us visas immediately. We had ‘one-way’ refugee passports. My husband was a machine engineer, I had studied agricultural school, and we received the visas immediately. (...) We rather wanted to go to an English-speaking country, to Canada, Australia, America, even to South Africa. It was difficult everywhere, and America was the most difficult. (…) We lived in a democratic country (Switzerland), and we thus had regular Czechoslovak visas. The Brazilians extended it twice for us, but then they said that they would not extend it again, unless they asked about it in the capital, which was still in Rio at that time. We thus decided that we would rather go to Brazil. That was in August 1949.”

“I travelled here in 1991, I think. When I saw the yard and its ‘delabré’ (devastated) state, as the French call it, I thought about how could one finance it to put it back to shape. I was a bit shocked by that. And I went to Switzerland where I met my son and my friends from Lausanne and Basel who arrived there to see me. (...) They were all telling me: you need to take it, because if you had not, some communists or racketeers would have gotten it instead, and you would then be angry. Just take it. And so I applied for a restitution process in order to make it in time.”