Otto Baru with his wife Ruzena Baruova and daughter Helena Krumholz

This photo was taken in Brno in 1927. Sitting on the right is my uncle Otto Baru, on the left is his wife Ruzena Baruova, nee Kohn, and in the middle is their young daughter, Helena Krumholz, nee Baruova. My mother had two older siblings. Her oldest brother was named Otto and the other one Bedrich Baru. Both were born in Brno, Otto in 1899 and Bedrich in 1900. Otto Baru studied at the Faculty of Medicine at Masaryk University in Brno. He became an outstanding eye doctor. He married Ruzena Kohn. In 1926 they had a daughter, Helena. Uncle Otto died very young, at the age of 29. Mother told me that he died in a car accident in October 1928. He was hurrying to work in Znojmo, and while passing the main cemetery in the direction of Moravia he drove into an unlighted pit. He died as a result of his injuries after being taken to the hospital. My grandmother never recovered from his death. In December 1928 she had a stroke and half of her body was paralyzed. My cousin Helena, whom our whole family calls Lenka, was deported to Lodz ghetto in Poland. She managed to survive, and after the war she married Ervin Krumholz, a native of Ostrava, whom she had met in Prague. Two years after the war they had a son, Dany. In 1948 they emigrated to Israel, where they lived about a year. But Ervin couldn't get used to the hot climate, so they both left for Canada and settled in Toronto. Ervin worked as an auto mechanic and Helena worked for years in a Canadian travel agency. The Krumholzes are quite religious Jews. They go to the synagogue regularly; they can even pick which one they want to go to, because in Toronto there's a lot of them. Ervin died in 2003. To this day Helenka and I write to each other in Czech. She's quite talkative and still commands her mother tongue perfectly.