Jan Fischer with his future wife Hana Fischer

Jan Fischer with his future wife Hana Fischer

This is me and my future wife Hana Fischer, nee Meisslova, in the center of Prague, on Na prikope Street. The photo was taken after the war in about 1946. My wife was Jewish. My wife was Jewish. She was born in Prague in 1921, but the family lived outside the capital. Her dad was a landowner. They were more Czech than us, but I don't know to what extent. She studied at high school for two years but didn't graduate. On returning to Prague I was faced with the problem of what to do. I was nothing. I had graduated from a German school. I didn't know what to do. Perhaps I could have studied, but if you are alone without a base or anything, things are difficult. As I didn't know what else to do, I decided for what I liked the best and what I had done in Terezin - the theater. A few other people who had been in the theater at Terezin got together, so there were about three or four of us. First of all, I lived with people who I knew in Prague - people from the art world I had met and such like. Then I applied for an apartment with Frantisek Jiska, a friend and actor. We got a two-room place where we stayed together. He later got married and threw me out. I then moved in with my future wife who had a one-room apartment. She had arrived in Prague before me - she had been deported back to Terezin earlier; a series of transports had returned to Terezin, as the Germans didn't have anywhere else to put people. So she was there at the very end of the war and went straight on to Prague where she managed to get a small apartment. People from the concentration camps were given apartments. Whoever wanted one could have registered with the Jewish community, but all they had to do was go to the National Committee. We had no papers though.
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