It wasn’t until she was an adult that she learned the full truth about the Jewish half of her family
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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.
