Edith Landesmann

“Our journey took ten days, more or less. We came to Israel a week before the war broke out. We came to Haifa by ship. My brother had been waiting there. There were many people who came to greet us and they would drive us with this nice car. Everything was new, and our friends, both old and new, gave us this beautiful welcome. We were among the last who came before the war. Later, many people came. When we had our flat, from our balcony we could see the sand next to this road that was going there. And we could see camels going back and forth. We could see them every morning as they went to a market. They had a bell, those animals, and it was just something quite new for us, to see camels on a road.”

“He came to Vienna and wanted to visit Czechoslovakia. So my husband would arrange for them to go to Czechoslovakia. Kubitschek wanted to know where he came from. My husband took him to Prague by car, but his family came from quite a small village. So they went to that village, but no one recognized him. But it was quite a thing – 'The President of Brazil would come visit us'. Meanwhile, I was with his wife and daughters, we went shopping in Vienna. They were buying everything they could.”

“We got back to Palestine and a few months later, the Israeli War of Independence started. We would volunteer right away, of course, I was the first girl to join the army, I guess. We stayed at home, but every day we would join our units. Both me and my husband. We were taught how to march with a weapon. Then the state had been established. And on that day, my husband was born. We were sitting upstairs, drinking some wine, listening to the radio. We were so happy! In the streets, all the people were dancing and singing, so we would come outside to join them, and we were singing and dancing as well. On the next day, we would wake up and we would hear the planes coming. So we would go to the rooftops and those planes started to shoot. My husband threw me to the ground and there were bullet-holes in the wall where I was standing. As those were the Arab planes that did the shooting. We thought they were on our side, yet they were Arab planes shooting at us. That's how the war started. It didn't take long, thank God; but it was the first time we experienced food shortages. There was no rice, no fresh fruits and many other things.”

“And from there we went to Paris by train. It was the first time I visited Europe after the war. In Palestine, we didn't feel it, just a little bit. There was no rice, there was no white sugar, but everything else you could get. After I ordered coffee and a croissant in Paris one morning, this waiter came, wondering why I would try to order coffee. And he brought this brown water of sorts. They had no croissants, but he brought me some crackers. Nowadays, you would give it to dogs, this hard stuff. The waiter asked me where I came from and I said I came from Palestine. He was surprised that we had coffee and croissants and there was no war there. He was looking at me as if I came from some distant star or something.”

“Then Hitler came and we had become second class citizens. We were not allowed to go to a park, then the summer came, we were not allowed to go to a swimming pool, to a cinema, we were not allowed to sit on park benches and we also couldn't take the tram. I used to walk to school anyway, but my father had been working in this factory in Obřany, and he couldn't just walk all the way, as it was too far away. So he had been issued a permit and every morning, a Gestapo car would come and they would bring him to the factory, and in the afternoon, they would bring him back again. My mother spent all their afternoons standing by the window, waiting. We had a room with windows all around, there were six of them. And she would go from one window to another, waiting for my father to come. Everyday she had been afraid that the Gestapo wouldn't bring him back. As a result my mother lost her voice. She couldn't speak. And at that time we needed all the paperwork done so we could leave the country. My father couldn't stay home as he had to be in the factory and my mother lost her voice, she couldn't speak. So they sent me to deal with the authorities. I was twelve years old. I was quite afraid, yet I went to those Gestapo offices. But they were nice to me. They didn't yell or anything, they just gave me the papers I had needed.”