Marta Rožnovská

* 1946

  • "He was in the army, retired with the rank of colonel. It was even offered to him that he would get a major general rank, but there was a condition that we would go back to Prague, and my mother - because we had to move all the time, so she didn't go there. But I remember that, that time... I might have been seven, that was, I remember that my mother took some Russian lessons, I don't know what it was called, and my grandmother and grandfather all had to join the [Communist] Party because of my father. They were only there because of him, so that he wouldn't lose his job, that was the fifties. I know my grandfather, he didn't like them very much, the communists, he always used to go to the pub, he used to swear madly at them, but for the sake of my dad not losing his post... Otherwise, it was somewhere in the fifties, and he was studying for a year in the then Soviet Union."

  • "I didn't actually find part, or a large part, of that family until I was in my fifties. I didn't know it at all. I didn't even know about my background, how it was. They say Mum is certain, Dad is uncertain. In our family, it was clearly so. Unfortunately, I had such a negative... it had a negative effect on me as a child because it was like a taboo and it wasn't talked about at all. I didn't really know anything. And even now, at this time, when I was still working, one of my colleagues said to me quite nastily, 'And you're not Jewish, are you?' So I'm not Jewish, I can tell her, 'I come from a Jewish family.'"

  • "Daddy had five sisters. We only knew about one of them. The four sisters perished, and their whole families perished in the concentration camps. My grandparents, or my father's parents, also perished. I didn't even have photographs, I didn't have anything. It wasn't until my dad died, in 1988, and it was his estate, he had this box where he had family photos, and that's where I first saw, in that photo, my grandmother and my grandfather, who I had no idea about, from his side."

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    Brno, 15.07.2021

    (audio)
    duration: 01:39:17
    media recorded in project Příběhy regionu - JMK REG ED
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It wasn’t until she was an adult that she learned the full truth about the Jewish half of her family

Marta Rožnovská, graduation photo board, 1965
Marta Rožnovská, graduation photo board, 1965
photo: Witness´s archive

Marta Rožnovská was born on 26 July 1946 in Pilsen. Her father Pavel Fiala fled to the Soviet Union in 1939, where he later joined the so-called Svoboda Army, with which he liberated Czechoslovakia. After the war he remained a professional soldier and as a committed communist reached the rank of colonel before retiring. He did not often tell his children about his wartime experiences and even less about his Jewish family, almost all of whom perished in the Holocaust. Marta Rožnovská thus did not know about her Jewish origins and the fate of half of her family until she was an adult. She graduated from the secondary medical school in Brno and worked as a nurse all her life. She learned the full truth about the fate of her Jewish relatives only from her cousin Hana, who managed to survive the war in emigration and later settled in the USA. In 2022 Marta Rožnovská was living in Brno.