Frantiska Diehlova

In this photo is my father's second wife's mother, Mrs. Frantiska Diehlova, nee Jiraskova. The photo was taken in our apartment in Holesovice in Prague in the 1930s. In September 1938 the workers in our porcelain factory went on strike to protest the fact that the border region was still Czechoslovak. By doing so they wanted to support Henlein and his efforts to have the so-called Sudetenland annexed by Germany. That day we left Dubi for Prague, and never again returned. Thus we arrived in Prague, where my father's mother-in-law from his second marriage lived. She was named Frantiska Diehlova, born Jiraskova in 1855, she was a cousin of Alois Jirasek. Her apartment was too small, and so only my aunt stayed there and my father lived with his wife's brother for a while, who with his Jewish wife had a slightly larger apartment in the Vinohrady quarter. Then they found an apartment near the Olsany Cemeteries and in 1939 they moved into a rented apartment in a villa in the Holesovice quarter, near the Troja Bridge. The owner and his family lived on the ground floor of the villa, my father and aunt rented the first floor, and then there was one more small apartment, where this one teacher lived. In that year, 1939, the owner accepted my father, aunt and her mother very willingly, when he didn't have the house paid off yet. After the war he then did everything to try to oust us. My aunt may have converted to Judaism already due to her first marriage, nevertheless she came from a Christian family, her father was a German from somewhere in the Rhineland. For Germans she was therefore of Aryan origin and thus also protected my father until almost the end of the war. Her mother died right after the war, in 1945.