“I went and there was behind a large desk an SS man, all medals, black uniform. I already knew them – they walked the streets. We knew. He was very nice to me. Really. I was surprised. He told me to sit down and asked whether he could be of any help. So I told him, ‘You took away my dad and I want to know where he is and I want you to return him to us.’ What else could have I told him than what I wanted. He looked at me and started talking to me, saying ‘I know. I understand.’ He was very polite and nice. Many years later I realised that this was their way. To do everything so that there were no protests. Always calm people down, everything was OK. In this way they managed to calm people down, persuade them they were going away for work. This was their way… The lesser excitement… everything in peace. To go in peace. He managed to appease me. ‘You will get a letter’ and ‘He will return’, which naturally was not true. But I believed him then. What could I do? And I went home.”
“They knew we were stealing. But they had to catch us at it. Once they did. We knew that to be caught meant the capital punishment. We did it nevertheless. We were so hungry and we exchanged the stolen goods for bread. When I think about it now, this was not a normal life. This Kurzavý got us out of it. We got some punishment – I can’t remember it clearly now – we cleaned some leaves, so we didn’t work with him (at Kurzavý’s – editor’s note). But then he said: ‘I need them’ and they put us back. We were lucky. He was really… When there were these trials after the war for everybody, we went and testified that he protected us. He was really someone who protected us. He was really a decent person.”
“I was just not willing to forget what had happened. Not to think about it. I don’t mean to forget but not to talk about it. This was something that had happened. Everything we wanted – not just me, I found out it was the same with the others – was to have a normal life. To be normal. I didn’t want to be marked. That I was someone who… And since then I never told anybody. Whenever they asked me ‘Where are you from?’ I replied, ‘I was born here.’ Naturally no one believed me because… I didn’t speak with an accent and I learned Hebrew very quickly. I never told anybody I had been to a concentration camp. Anybody. But it wasn’t just me. We all stopped talking about it. Because each of us had a feeling that people didn’t understand, how it was possible. It is indeed very difficult to understand. And we couldn’t explain it. So we just stopped talking about it.”
“I didn’t know where I actually belonged, or who we were. One day I asked: ‘Who are we, actually? Are we Czechs or Germans?’ A child cannot understand these things, and I didn’t know. They talked and I heard; a child understands many things, but does not know what to do with them. My dad told me something very smart. He said: ‘Listen, never forget what I now tell you. We are not Germans. We are not Czechs, either. We are Jews. And you will always remain a Jew, because you were born that way. Even if one day you do not want to be one, you will always be a Jew in the eyes of other people. So be proud of it.’ And he told me: ‘We are an ancient nation,’ and so on, and about Zionism. When we were children and teenagers, we were going to Maccabi Hatzair, and we exercised there. We had a large playground in Pohořelice and it was called Maccabiplatz. And it is still called Maccabiplatz, even today.”
“By luck, or coincidence, I have stayed in Terezín. When we arrived to Terezín, eighty or ninety percent from each transport were immediately sent off. Very few people remained in Terezín. Terezín was actually a camp through which people passed, although there were about fifty or sixty thousand of them. There were many of us, and it was very intense, sleeping in the bunk beds. It was not easy, but the Zionist organization tried to keep the young people there. Obviously, it was the Judenrat that was doing that. One person from Judenrat decided that I… I was fourteen… that he would be my apotropus (custodian). In this way, I was included in his registration card and thus I was protected from a transport. Only in case he would be sent away in a transport, I would have to go, too.”
“Actually, I lived in the ghetto for the whole three years and worked in agriculture. Towards the end, in 1944 when they were nearly eliminating the ghetto, there were only twelve thousand of us remaining out of the fifty or sixty thousand who were originally there for the whole time. There was nobody, the place was empty. The ghetto was suddenly empty. Why did we stay there? Because he told us: ‘Do not volunteer for it.’ I had a friend, and her parents were there and she said: ‘I cannot let my parents go alone, of course I am going with them.’ She was not listed in the transport, because he had told the Germans: ‘If you take away those girls from me, you will have no vegetables.’”
Ruth Meissner, née Haasová, was born February 24, 1928 in Znojmo in a Jewish family as the younger one of two daughters. She grew up in Pohořelice, where her father’s family ran their business. Both her parents were Zionists and they brought up their two daughters in the Zionist spirit. Both daughters were members of the group Maccabi Hatzair. Their mother died in a young age before World War Two. Their father escaped to Brno with both girls and their grandmother after the Sudeten region had been taken over by Germans in autumn 1938. He was arrested on the street during a Gestapo raid in 1941 and he subsequently died in Mauthausen in the same year. On March 29, 1942, Ruth, her sister Miriam and their grandmother were deported to the ghetto in Terezín where their grandmother died several months later. Ruth Meissner stayed in the girls’ home L410 and she worked in agriculture. A custodian was assigned to her and this measure protected her from being deported in a transport. She and her sister have survived in the ghetto until the end of the war. They settled in Prague after the liberation. Miriam completed a course for nurses in Prague and in 1948 she applied as a volunteer to go to the war for independence of the recently established State of Israel. She went there in autumn 1948 together with a group of other volunteers. Ruth worked in an army hospital as a nurse for two years and later she got a job in a children’s home. For several years she was living in Salvador with her husband, who was of Czech origin as well and whose family had emigrated there in 1948. Mr. and Mrs. Meissner returned to Israel in the late 1960s together with their three children. Ruth Meissner is a widow and she lived in Kiryat Tivon. She passed away on February, 2023.
Family photo taken during the celebration of grandmother's 60th birthday. Ruth's mother sitting in the middle row 2nd from right, holding her daughter Miriam. Father standing in upper row 1st from right.
Family photo taken during the celebration of grandmother's 60th birthday. Ruth's mother sitting in the middle row 2nd from right, holding her daughter Miriam. Father standing in upper row 1st from right.
