On this photograph is my mother, Hana Frischmannova [née Pfeiferova].
I think that she looks very good in this photograph, she was a very pretty and kind woman.
She had her picture taken in a Prague photo studio in a dress typical of the Art Nouveau period, and a fashionable hat.
In her youth my mother must have been an incredibly beautiful woman, many, many men wanted to marry her. Her parents insisted that her husband has to be Jewish.
She didn't feel that this was a necessity, but in the end had the luck to meet my father, who she loved and who at the same time was a Jew.
My mother was one of five children, and was born in 1896, from my grandfather's second marriage.
She managed a textile firm that her grandfather bought for her. They sewed bedding and women's lingerie, towels and dishcloths.
At one time the firm was quite prosperous, and sold to the rich and famous. They even exported goods to America.
My mother was a kind woman, and extremely hard-working. She took care of the household and firm, and when my father died, we had the misfortune that our so-called business representative stole some money. Suddenly we had debts.
Mother paid it all off, to this day I remember that when we were due to leave for the concentration camp, we all thought that we were going to get through it with no problem.
We were even annoyed with our mother for saying: ‘If I don't survive this, I'm telling you now, I don't have even a crown in debts.’ But after the war people appeared with debt notes that weren't real.
At that time I paid off about 50 thousand, because I didn't want to argue. But it was completely obvious that these notes were created by my mother for the case that if someone found our property with people that we had hidden it with, those people could claim that they had it as collateral for money they had loaned us.
Of course in reality they hadn't lent us anything. I don't think, though, that these people meant it badly, they simply forgot how it had originally been arranged before the war, and thought that I actually owed them the money.
