“It was unpleasant. I was ten, and I remember how we listened to the radio every evening. Those dreadful, monotonous voices. It was so unpleasant when the defendants spoke. They were friends of my parents, mainly my father. For instance, Clementis - they had studied together. Then, after the trials, a man came to our house one time. He had been a lawyer in the past. A very nice, elderly gentleman. He told my dad they had expected to see him them sooner or later. But because we were in the border region, the Sudetes, where there was a lack of doctors and where no one wanted to take his place, we somehow survived without trouble.”
“We applied after twenty years. Things had eased up a bit, and a family that had lived in the same town as us had gotten permission. That was a pharmacist just before retirement. They informed us we were to pay forty thousand for the family and that we’d get passports. I was in the fifth year of my studies. I went to the assistant who was to test us in politics. That was something that had nothing to do with medicine. I told him I wouldn’t come to the exam because we were moving. He said I would come, because he had been to the ministry the day before and they’d told him that no more doctors would leave the country.”
“For instance, we knew that our teacher in the fourth year was a snitch. That he asked around the class what kind of radio we had at home, if it made a lot of noise and if it was difficult to listen to. He wanted to spy out who was listening to Free Europe. But our youth was pretty clever. None of those who did listen, like us and some others, told him anything. Then I met him when I was leaving. He was at the national committee in Děčín, and he had to sign my list of books that I was taking with me. And although I included some books by Masaryk and others, which were not exactly to the regime’s liking, he signed it for me.”
Judith Kellner-Tauberová was born on 11 May 1943 in Palestine. She lived with her mother in Nahariya and Haifa until she was three. Her father Hainz Jakob Tauber left to fight in the Czechoslovak Foreign Army. He was deployed at Tobruk and later participated in the second wave of the Allied invasion of Normandy. Several of Judith’s relatives died in concentration camps because they were Jews. In 1946 she and her mother joined her father in Czechoslovakia, where he was completing his university degree. When the Taubers wanted to emigrate to the newly established State of Israel a few years later, the Communists denied them passage. Her father worked as a doctor in Benešov nad Ploučnicí. In 1966 the witness graduated from the Faculty of Medicine of Charles University in Prague. She married an Israeli citizen, which also enabled her to leave the country. She worked in Israel as a pathologist for thirty years.
