Marietta Smolkova with her cousins Mariana and Petr Bruml

This photograph is from the year 2001, when I was celebrating my 80th birthday. On the left is my cousin Mariana, and on the right my cousin Petr Bruml. Both are the children of my uncle Pepa Bruml, my mother's brother. Both live in London. Besides my mother, my grandmother and grandfather also had three sons, of whom Benedikt and Jan were twins born in 1896 or 1897. Josef, who they called Pepa, was a year older than my mother, so born in 1893. Uncle Pepa and his family lived in Teplice, where he took over Grandpa's clothing store. During the Great Depression they were faring very badly, so they moved to Liberec, where his father-in-law, Mr. Seger, a Jew originally from Kolin, lived. Pepa's wife was named Eli. They had two children, a son, Petr, born in 1926, and a daughter, Mariana. We often spent time with Pepa's family. I liked them very much; we had a lot in common as far as personality goes, too. Pepa used to go to synagogue for Yom Kippur and sometimes during the Sabbath, too. I think that his religiousness was relatively lukewarm. They definitely didn't have a kosher household.