Georg Goetz

This is a photograph of my father, Georg Goetz. It was taken sometime during the 1930s, but unfortunately I don't have a clue as to where. My father was a German Jew named Georg Goetz. He lived in Chemnitz, Germany. He used to raise racehorses and also did harness racing. I don't know much about him. His parents were both Jews, but I didn't know them at all. I don't know what sort of education my father had, or if he was religious. I have the impression that my parents met at some spa, where my mother used to accompany her mother. After their wedding my mother moved to Chemnitz, where I was born and lived during my first four years. I remember being told that we had lived in some sort of villa, which was near a farmstead where my father raised his horses. Supposedly I was constantly under the supervision of a nanny and teacher, but once it happened that I found myself alone in the farm courtyard. They told me how I started running and fell into a cesspool of liquid horse manure. They pulled me out and put me in the tub, where they first rinsed me still dressed. My parents' marriage didn't last long, and they divorced after four years. After that my mother returned with me to Prague, but my father didn't want to let my mother keep me. In the end they had to go to court, which decided that I would live with my grandmother and grandfather on my mother's side. My father then remarried, but had no other children, so I remained his little girl. I liked him. Though Dad didn't come to Prague to visit me, my grandfather used to take me to the German border, where I saw my father several times. He died in 1934 in Chemnitz.