Ruth Goetzova with her mother Hilda Lasova

This is a picture of me and my mother, Hilda Lasova. It was taken in Chemnitz, Germany, in 1924 when I was a one-year-old baby. My father was a German Jew named Georg Goetz. He lived in Chemnitz, Germany. 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. About a year after we returned to Prague from Germany, my mother married for a second time, a Czech Jew named Ota Las, who came from Serlovice near Tabor.