Hedviga Glückauf with her sister Marie Pick and their children

Hedviga Glückauf with her sister Marie Pick and their children

This photograph from the year 1935 shows two of my mother's sisters with their sons. On the left hand side is Marie Pick, nee Waldstein with her son Petr and on the right Hedviga Glückauf, nee Waldstein with Karel. I don?t know where the picture was taken. My mother had three sisters, Hedviga, Marie and Valerie. Hedviga married a man named Glückauf. They had a son named Karel who was an excellent swimmer. He swam for Maccabi. Glückauf worked in Brno for a company named Placek, and later he opened his own fur store. They called the second sister Marenka. She married Fredy Pick, who worked as a dental technician. They had one daughter, Veruska. My mother's youngest sister, Valerie, was married in Prague to Mr. Roth, who was a traveling salesman. My mother's sisters observed Judaism only in the sense that they had Jewish husbands. They went to the synagogue only on the major religious holidays, which I don't consider to be religiousness. It's really every Jew's obligation. I practically don't remember a thing about my aunts on my mother's side. I only met them once a year at my grandfather's in Prestice, where we spent vacations together. Like me, my cousins on my mother's side were in those days very young, so we didn't have a lot of common experiences. I do remember, however, that they sent me as the youngest to Grandpa's store to steal peanuts. Grandpa would pretend that he didn't see me. Besides this we used to play cards with Grandpa, but that's all that I remember. All of Mother's sisters died in concentration camps together with their children and husbands. Only Marenka's husband Fredy Pick survived, who then remarried and settled in Varnsdorf. Among those few lucky ones that survived was also my mother's father.
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