Gertruda Glasova

This is a photo of my mother, Gertruda Glasova. When you look at her eyes carefully, you?ll see that they?re defective, my mother was cross-eyed. We?ve got big problems with eyesight in our family, and it's possible that it's a result of genetic damage, which took place because for many generations the members of only two families intermarried. So my mother had very poor eyesight, but didn't wear glasses - my father was against it. My mother was born in 1896 in Jihlava as the third of five children of the Fischers. Not only did she graduate from lyceum, which wasn?t very common for girls back then, but also attended four semesters of chemistry at university in Vienna. She wasn?t very well off financially, but despite that, she told me that she rather spent her food money on culture. She got tuberculosis, probably due to the poor conditions she was living in, and later this caused her a lot of suffering. She then married my father, and followed him when he was transferred to Prague as a financial clerk. My mother used to say that she became a household hussy out of love for my father. Because even though she was offered work, where she would have even earned more than him, Father was old-school and wouldn't permit his wife to work at all, much less earn more than he did. Actually, I don?t think that my mother had much of a life. After her first son was born her tuberculosis broke out, at the end of the 1920s came economical problems, my father lost his job, then the war started, Terezin, my father perished and she was a widow. After the war, life was no longer very worthwhile.