Rudolf Kovanic

This is a picture of my husband, Rudolf Kovanic, taken in the 1930s. My husband was born on 16th December 1908 into a Jewish family. My husband was one of four children, he had two brothers and one sister. Before the war he graduated from business academy and worked for the Justitz company in the grain wholesale business. He spoke fluent German and for a long time also studied English. My husband was an amazingly kind person. I probably have never met a kinder person. Unfortunately due to Terezin he had serious emotional problems, he almost had a nervous breakdown there. As I've already said, he was in Terezin right from the beginning, in all for about four years, which must unavoidably have marked him in some way. What's more, my husband had a relatively large amount of responsibility in Terezin, he already begun there as an administrative manager, later they entrusted him with further tasks. People in Terezin were desperate, and for example stole wood for heating, or tried to improve their lot in other ways, but often there would be checks done, which, if they found out anything like that, would immediately have caused my husband to be arrested by the Gestapo. Once, when my husband had some problem of this type, he was completely down-and-out because of it, luckily in the end the matter was resolved only with the ghetto's Jewish leadership, which was presided over by some Mr. Freiberger. Because Terezin had this Jewish self-government, it was called the 'Ältestenrat' [Council of Elders]. Once, another thing that happened to my husband was that he met the supreme commander of the ghetto, Karl Rahm, who out of the blue told him to take off his glasses, and gave him a couple of cuffs. Basically the Germans could do with us what they wanted.