Rudolf Auerbach with his son Asaf

This is a photograph of my father Rudolf Auerbach with me. It was taken in the Bet Alfa kibbutz in the 1920s. He's still got a lot of hair, but otherwise he was bald quite early on. The way it worked in the kibbutz was that the parents had to work all day, and children were placed in this nursery school where they were taken care of. Perhaps only when a child was still very small, his mother would get work in the kibbutz, not somewhere out in the fields, so that she could nurse him. Families were together only in the evening, when the parents picked up the children, played with them a bit so that the children would know that they've even got some parents, and for the night they put them back into the nursery school. I was born on 28th May 1928 in Ainharud, a town near Bet Alfa, where there was a maternity ward. I spent the first two years of my life in the Bet Alfa kibbutz. The first language they began teaching me was undoubtedly Ivrit, but I don't remember a thing of it. I actually don't remember anything from the entire period of my life that I spent at the kibbutz in Palestine. We left when I was two years old. Why, that I don't know. It's possible that my parents had health problems due to the climate there, and so they decided to return to Czechoslovakia. It's almost certain, though, that at the time I was born they weren't considering returning yet - otherwise they'd scarcely have given me the name that they did - Asaf.