Dagmar Lieblova´s uncle

This is a picture of my mom´s elder brother Ervin and his wife Helena on their wedding day.

Ervin was born in 1895 in Malin. He lived in Dejvice, Prague, in what is now Ckalova Street, and worked as a bank clerk.

At the end of the 1920s he married Helena Schillerova, a Jewish woman. Her father had married twice, so she had two step-sisters who lived in Kolkovna Street in Prague.

During the Protectorate, when Jews had to move out of the better quarters, Ervin and Helena later moved in with him.

Ervin and Helena had a son, Tomas, who was born in 1936. I don't know how religious they were, but I think that Uncle Ervin wasn't devout. They all later perished in concentration camps.

Uncle Ervin and Aunt Helena went to Terezin relatively late, in 1943, and were sent to Birkenau on one of the September transports in the very same year. When my mom and I arrived in Birkenau in December 1943, we met people who had been on the September transports.

We were standing in line, waiting to be given a number tattooed on our arm, when an acquaintance of my mom's appeared and told her: "You know that Helena Reitmanova is a widow?"

She knew that my mom knew Mrs. Reitmanova, but not that she was her sister-in-law and that the person who had died was mom's brother. Aunt Helena was sent with Tomas to the gas chamber in March of the following year.