Mgr. Jana Teššerová
* 1948
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"My father said, 'We don't have anywhere else to go.' So he made up this thing where he put Mommy in the double bed. And he stood behind the wardrobe in this sort of alcove, but before that he had already messed up everything in the room. Everything. The chairs, he opened the window, the door. Everything was ruined on the floor so that when they came there looking for them, they'd think they'd escaped. So he destroyed that whole room like that. And I mean, it didn't take long, a few minutes, when they went into the apartment. They were from Kezmarok. These were not Germans who came looking for my parents. They were locals, member of Hlinka Guard. And they went into that room and they saw that the room was in a desolate state and they shouted. And my father heard, 'That would be fine now, we'd shoot them right here and I'd beat them to death.' They heard exactly what those guardsmen were saying. Mum said it was something terrible. And Mom said she was sick, she had the flu, she was coughing a lot. That was interesting, that at that time, when she was in that bed, if she coughed, they would have known right away that they were hidden in there. One of those guardsmen sat down, so he jumped up and sat on the bed. On the other side where she was lying in those double beds. They were in that room for maybe thirty minutes and they were shooting at those things in there. They cursed and yelled at the Jews and all sorts of things and left. So my dad talked about that period like that, that it was a period of miracle that they were able to save themselves like that."
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"Mom kept talking about her fear. She was experiencing tremendous fear. Even though she was the one who was the youngest in the family who didn't have children. But she had a profound fear. She talked about it, I guess, every day. My dad wasn't as outgoing, but by the fact that my mom survived the Holocaust, it left a awful mark on her. The trauma, the depression. And because she couldn't control herself, she talked about it all the time. I don't remember a day that the subject didn't come up in our house. I guess Mom forgot that we were the kids and that we were also hearing it every time. And we didn't realize that it didn't work that way in other families. As a child, I thought that what my mother was saying was what every aunt in Kezmarok was saying. But when I grew older, when I realized that it was only us, not the neighbors, who talked like that, we somehow found it harder to bear. Well, I did, I certainly did. Anyway, I had strange states of fear of war. When there was a siren, for example. I would hide because I would shout, 'There's going to be a war'. Dad: ' No, there's not going to be a war. This is the harvest. It's burning somewhere.' But you don't tell a kid for nothing, because that kid grows up in trauma."
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"But we were not actively involved. Not at all. We knew it was some political thing. We knew there was someone who wanted to change the world. We knew someone was trying to change the world, but we were positive on their behalf. Were we cowardly? I don't know, maybe we were cowards also. But we had children. The parents were unhealthy, they were depressed, for their sake we would never have done that to harm them. They were pretty depressed anyway. They had severe trauma also. So we tried to keep everything so normal that we didn't make a problem for them because they were the ones affected. That I have trauma from my parents, because you know today, if you know the doctor, the professor of neurology, Ivan Rektor from Brno. He's doing research that trauma is inherited in the genes and I've met him, he's claiming that he's got it documented. You need to talk to him, he knows better. So, we've all had trauma, our trauma. It manifested itself in fear inherited from our parents, and then in the form of fear for the children. We lived so differently, you know, sort of... we're scared for the children, we're scared for the parents. We were always afraid of something. Because there was always somebody above us that was stressing us out. And we, of course, passed that on to this next generation. We lived comfortably, but we didn't engage in anything."
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Košice, 22.06.2022
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Between the first inhalation and the last exhalation there is one extremely beautiful moment, life. Let us cherish it.
Jana Teššerová was born on August 4, 1948 in Kežmarok, a town in the Tatra Mountains, into an Orthodox Jewish family. Her parents, mother Regina and father Leo, managed to hide in the house of the Žihal family and survived the Holocaust, thus she can be included in the second generation of survivors. As a child, she grew up with her parents and older brother in Kežmarok. Jana’s childhood was largely marked by the trauma of her mother Regina, who lost almost her entire extended family during the Holocaust. It took her a long time to recover from these difficult events and they were accompanied by various health problems. In 1966 Jana graduated from the Gymnasium of Pavel Orszagh Hviezdoslav in Kežmarok. She had always believed that she would become a teacher, so after graduating from high school she applied to the Faculty of Arts at the P. J. Šafárik University in Prešov, which she successfully completed in 1971. Immediately after finishing her university studies, she married her husband and moved to Košice, where she began teaching at the Gymnasium on Šrobárová Street. She worked as a teacher at this grammar school until 1993, then she was elected as the headmistress in a selection procedure, which she was until 2009. During her years as headmistress, together with the teaching staff, despite the difficult post-revolutionary conditions, she managed, through hard work, to make this gymnasium a prestigious educational institution with many distinguished graduates. After 2009, she taught for the next ten years at the Kukučínova Secondary Medical School, also in Košice. Today, despite her retirement age, she is very active in spreading awareness of the events connected with the Second World War and the Holocaust. She regularly lectures at secondary and primary schools, where she introduces pupils to the life of Jews during the war. She is also the curator of the Ľudovít Feld Gallery in Košice.