This is picture of my grandparents´s store.
From left there is standing my granddad, housemaid Fanynka and my grandmom.
My grandmother on my mother's side was called Augusta Reitmanova and was born in 1870 in the Bohemian-Moravian highlands in a village called Pokrikov. Her dad apparently had a tavern or a little store.
My grandfather on my mother's side was called Maxmilian Reitman and was born in Trhova Kamenice near Chrudim in 1870. He lived with my grandmother a short distance from Kutna Hora in the village of Malin, where they had a little house with a little grocery store inside.
Malin was about 7 km from Kutna Hora and is now part of the town. Behind the store was a kitchen and, further on, two rooms and a courtyard. I think that they didn't have running water and the toilet was in the yard. It was a rustic building.
I remember it must have been a very low structure because my dad, who was relatively small, could touch the ceiling. My grandparents had a dog called Haryk, who could always sense well in advance when I was coming with my parents for a visit.
He would then start barking. My grandparents were rather poor. They had store and an assistant in it but my grandmother was mostly at the counter.
Various ideas used to come to my grandfather, so one day he would sell vegetables, another day something different, so my grandmother was the mainstay of the store. My grandparents sold the house and store in 1934 or 1935 and moved in with us in our house in Kutna Hora.
Housemaid of my grandparents Fanynka once told me that my grandfather Maxmilian's dad was in the army with my grandmother's dad Josef Herman. According to my calculations, this must have been in 1866.
They are said to have made friends at the time and to have arranged to get married once they had children, which is what happened later.
Allegedly, my grandmother was originally with someone else, but her parents didn't approve as he wasn't a Jew, so she married the suitor of their choice.
Both of my grandparents came from a Czech-speaking family. I don't think either of them had any higher education.
My grandfather was religious and went to the synagogue regularly, not only on the main holidays, and he would take me with him.
My grandmother was also religious. She didn't go to the synagogue, but she did try to observe the Sabbath. She prayed with mom at home and they both fasted on Yom Kippur.
My grandmother had varicose veins and ulcers, so, as far as I can remember, she wasn't very steady on her feet. As she couldn't get about, she sat and knitted for days at a time. Not on the Sabbath, though. She tried to observe the rule about not working on the Sabbath.
When she was living with my grandfather at our place in Kutna Hora and dad wanted us to do the housework on Saturday with my sister, grandmother would say that it could wait until Sunday.
Grandfather died in 1941, he had Jewish burial, grandmother did not survive concentration camp.
