The nuns took good care of us, but I couldn’t see my parents
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Selma Menezes, née Reiner, was born in Bucharest, Romania on 7 August 1935. She came from a Jewish family, but her father was not religious while her mother was. The family did not observe Jewish customs and spoke German at home. In 1941, the witness joined the first year of a Hebrew school, but the Nazis closed it six months later. For the next four years, she and three other Jewish girls hid in a Bucharest convent with French nuns. She saw her parents only rarely, and then only through a glass pane. In the convent, she learned French and studied. Her parents survived the war in good health and the family reunited. Selma Menezes studied philology, English and literature, at university. In 1956, she married Jan Kalousek, a Czechoslovak, and after about a year she was permitted to travel to Prague to meet him. Two children were born to them. She worked for Air India and stayed in Tokyo in the late sixties and early seventies. The children and husband stayed in Prague. She spent some time in France, then in North Africa and Canada, where she lived until 2022. In 2023 she lived in Prague, in the Hagibor Social Care Home.
