Pavel Friedmann

“Later, after we had already been in Israel for some time I asked aunt Bella if she wanted us to do something for Mr. Heriban. At that time I knew that there was Katarína Ferancová, which I had not know before. I explained to aunt Bella that there was so-called Righteous Among the Nations in Israel, and that perhaps now it would be a suitable opportunity to do something for Mr. Heriban. Aunt Bella somehow considered it, but no activity took place until my mom decided that she would write in aunt Bella's name about aunt Bella's experiences and about how she had been saved. My mom wrote it, I printed it and we sent it to Yad Vashem. Some gentleman from Yad Vashem then came to us and he spoke to mom - aunt Bella was no longer alive at that time - and the testimony given by my mother was thus based on facts which she knew from aunt Bella and partly from my father as well. Yad Vashem probably verified it because there were three other people who were still alive in Israel and who had been saved together with aunt Bella in that attic. Yad Vashem somehow found some other documents and other testimonies.”

“My father’s dream that I would become a pharmacist and that we would have our own private pharmacy has not come true. Two years after our arrival I was drafted to do the compulsory military service, and therefore I was not able to take the secondary school leaving exams. Our departure from Czechoslovakia, when I was nearly seventeen , was bad timing. I don’t even remember it because back there I was a student in the eleventh grade and I had one year to go to graduate from secondary school and when I arrived here I needed one year to learn the new language. Meanwhile I already turned eighteen. When I was eighteen and a half, I was summoned to prepare for the compulsory military service. So I was drafted and I served the compulsory three years in the army.”

“My father and mother have both perceived it for all those years after the end of the Second World War, even though a new life started for them. They married on 1st July 1947 and a new era in Czechoslovakia started and people felt more free. My father worked as a pharmacist, so in a certain way the life became normal and relatively pleasant. But as I mentioned a while ago, it was not possible to ignore the fact that there have been victims in my mother's family and my father's family as well, people who had not returned from concentration camps. I imagine what they felt when they remembered them on a given day every year. Since they knew when their family members had been deported and therefore they observed a day of remembrance for them every year, in church and at home, remembering that their brother, sister, mother, father, lost their lives so tragically in the Polish territory, in gas chambers. I think that for them it was some basis that it was still present in the background, that Czechoslovakia could not be a safe future for people of Jewish descent who have lost their siblings just for being of Jewish descent. This is one reason why they decided to relocate, and the second is because my mother had two brothers and two sisters here in Israel.”