Jan Glas

This is a picture of my brother Jan Glas. It was taken in Prague in 1972. My brother actually only talked about what he'd experienced during the war immediately after his return, with our mother. The concentration camp may have affected my brother differently, but even worse. He told me how once he went to see the movie ?Some Like It Hot.? It's this comedy and gangster movie, and the film's opening scene is from real life. One gang kills another gang on St. Valentine's day in a garage, and then what happens after that is that a couple of men accidentally saw it, and the gangsters try to catch them. My brother told me that with this scene, the film was over for him, that he couldn't watch it any further. To shoot people in a garage... What he'd gone through in Auschwitz and Kaufering returned to him again. Actually, after the war my brother became the head of the family. He used to fill out various questionnaires and forms, that's something I couldn't do. So it was he, my brother, who decided that we wouldn't emigrate, that we'd stay here. My mother's two sisters lived in Australia, and Grandma moved there, too. But I wouldn't be able to get used to any other country, my home is here. My mother and brother were also of the same opinion. After the war he always had a big complex that he hadn't gotten a proper education. Yet he was very talented and would definitely have had the abilities for it. But he didn't get the opportunity. Before the war he managed to only finish kvarta [equivalent of Grade 9], and after the war he took a one-year business course. Then he had to start working, because I had an orphan's pension, my mother a widow's, but who would have supported him? Maybe that after the war he wasn't even inclined to further studies, the most important things he learned in that one-year course, and his head was probably too pumped dry for anything more. As a 30 percent invalid, he was quite badly off. I remember once going swimming with him in the Vltava River. He had a very hard time swimming across, even though it was quite narrow. Though after the war he did do canoe racing and skiing, it apparently didn't agree with him. He got a job with Kovospol, a foreign trade company. In 1958 they wanted to fire him on the grounds that he had relatives abroad. That was sort of an echo of the events in Hungary. But back then that was the last quarter where that had to be approved by the National Committee. The National Committee didn't agree, because my brother was a 30 percent concentration camp invalid, so they had to leave him there, but transferred him to a different position. First to the transport department, then the accounting department. As I later found out, because he was capable, he still unofficially managed foreign trade from the accounting department, but wasn't allowed to travel anywhere, and actually wasn't anything. Then they thought of him again in 1962, when they were starting to introduce computer technology, so they pulled him out of the accounting department. Back then, computers were punch-card machines. Then he had his first heart attack; in 1964 my son was born, and when he was coming up to our place to have a look at him, he had serious problems. They diagnosed him with angina pectoris. In 1968 he had a second heart attack and went on disability pension, which was lucky for him, because in the purges after the help of the brotherly armies he would definitely have been thrown out, he was on the plant's board. In 1976 he had a third heart attack, of which he died.