I was born on March 23, 1921, in the village of Miřkov/Mirschikau, in the Bohemian Forest. The house was built for my parents when they were married in 1919. It was on a farm rented from the formerly noble von Trauttmansdorff family. On the house facade were my parents’ initials. My sister Marianne was born there two years later.
My mother Elsa, née Ornstein, came from Waldmünchen in Bavaria, two miles beyond the border. Her parents were Bohemian Jews, her mother more German, her father more Czech. They had moved to Waldmünchen as a young couple, but returned to Bohemia in 1933 and then lived kitty-corner across from us in Horšovský Týn/Bischofteinitz until we all had to flee in 1938. My mother and her sisters attended the only girls’ school in Waldmünchen, a convent school. My mother was such a good student that the nuns urged my grandparents to let her join their order and become a teacher. My father Karl Ábeles was descended from Jews who farmed in the West Bohemian countryside. The members of my family mostly spoke to each other in High German, and with the servants and villagers in the Egerland dialect.
Source: Wilma and Georg Iggers, Two Lives in Uncertain Times, New York: Berghahn Books, 2006, p. 11f