Artur Radvansky's family home

This is a photograph of my family home in Radvanice, near Ostrava, taken in modern times, similarly like all the photographs of the house that my father built in 1931. During the First Republic it belonged to Mr. Habr, and my parents rented an apartment in it after their wedding. It consisted of two rooms and a kitchen. Radvanice was a small town that already in those days had electricity and running water. I remember that my father had an electric refrigerator in his store. The nearest large city was Ostrava, from which led a narrow-gauge streetcar through Petrvald and Radvanice to Orlova and Karvina. We weren't the only Jews in Radvanice. There were about fifteen Jewish families in all. Their children were around the same age as me, so I could play with them. Mostly they were German-speaking Jews, and you could say that they were a little on the atheistic side. They observed only the main holidays, but perhaps for example not Sabbath. There was for example the Lauber family, they were already assimilated, then the Kohl siblings who had a textile store, Fogl the baker, whose son had run away to join the Foreign Legion and returned in 1936 or 1937, and then also made a living as a baker.