Wilma Iggers in front of pupils at Graf-Stauffenberg-Gymnasium Osnabrück.
This video is currently only available in German. Below you will find an English translation of the audio track.
“My family was mostly German-speaking, and my parents and grandparents all knew Czech well and were farmers.
Very often people react in astonishment because they never knew that there were also Jewish farmers. We had quite a few and in our case … - that saved our lives too. I’ll talk about that later.
We were able to emigrate to Canada as farmers because Canada needed farmers even though they weren’t that fond of Jewish farmers. But there were very few other options, at least without special relationships and above all without a lot of money.
I went to the German elementary school in my hometown [writes name on the board] Bischofteinitz and then afterwards to the Czech grammar school in another town about 10 km away from Bischofteinitz. And I was there until 1938 - that was at the beginning of the 7th grade of the grammar school. In autumn 1938 the so-called Sudeten area - the German-speaking border area - was occupied by Nazi Germany and we emigrated to Canada.”