Osnabrück, 2005
“My family was mostly German-speaking, but my parents and grandparents all knew Czech well and were farmers. Very often people react to this with surprise, because they never knew that there were Jewish farmers too. There were quite a few with us. And that saved our lives too, I’ll talk about that later.
We were able to emigrate to Canada as farmers because Canada needed farmers when they actually didn’t have Jewish farmers. But there were very few other options, at least without special relationships or - above all - without a lot of money.
I went to the German elementary school in my hometown [writes the name of the town on the board] Bischofteinitz and then afterwards to the Czech grammar school, but in another town about 10 km away from Bischofteinitz. I was there until 1938 - that was at the beginning of the seventh grade of the grammar school and in autumn 1938 the so-called Sudeten area - i.e. the German-speaking border area of Nazi Germany was occupied and we emigrated to Canada.”