PART 1 - Early Years
Sigo Vitezslav Weber
(Extracted from Eventful Journeys)

None of my grandparents were alive when I was born. My maternal grandparents had an inn on the river Vistula. My mother inherited it and that is where I was born. The river was used for floating timber downstream and the people riding the logs would stay overnight at the inn.
This is where my mother Malka Farber grew up. She was born late in her father’s life, during his second marriage, so that by the tine I was born my cousins were already grown-up. As was the custom, her marriage to my father was probably arranged because Jews lived so far apart from each other. The shadchen (marriage arranger) would travel miles between villages on foot or horseback, bringing news from one family to another.
The newly married couple lived at the inn. She had her first child when she was thirty and within four years she and my father had three sons, Jacob, Max and myself. When I was three, we moved to Teschen. Tesin is the Czech spelling - in German it is Teschen and Cieszyn in Polish. Teschen was in Eastern Silesia and was claimed by both the Czechs and Poles after the break-up of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The dispute was eventually resolved by dividing the area between the two claimants with the river Olsa as the borderline. ,The older and historic part of Teschen became Polish, while the smaller part (where we lived) with its important railway junction, became part of Czechoslovakia. In Teschen there were two bridges over the river Olsa and people living locally were issued with passes to enable them to cross freely between the two countries.

My father’s name was Aharon but my mother called him Arnold. I believe his family came originally from Teschen because his two elder brothers, Uncles Rudolph and Bernard, retired cattle and horse dealers lived there. After the partition, their homes were on the Polish side. Mother’s two other brothers, Joseph and Sigmund, also lived on the Polish side, two short train journeys away inland in Polish Silesia.
Smuggling was rife in both directions; food was cheaper in Poland while many manufactured goods were cheaper on the Czech side.
The railway was the centre of everything because it brought life and work to the area. The station was only a seven-minute walk from our house - you could hear the trains at night.

We lived in Svibice, a suburb of Teschen. My parents kept a general store where they weighed out all the goods like flour, rice, salt or sugar from big sacks. Eggs, butter or vegetables were on sale at a twice-weekly market. Many produced their own, so my parents did not stock those. A lot was given on credit because people were poor - it was a hard living but that was normal. We never went hungry but by the standards of the time and our area, we were considered well to do. We had two adjoining two-storey houses with about a dozen tenants. We lived on the second floor of one and the rest was let as apartments. It sounds grand but in those days a tenants’ protection law kept the rents low. So, being a landlord was not a great income. If I were to take you into my home, you would enter by the front door into the communal hall. A wide staircase separated it with apartments on either side. Downstairs led to the cellars where every tenant had a portion to store coal, potatoes and apples imbedded in straw to keep them safe from the frost during winter.

A big room on the ground floor was converted into the shop with a shop window and its own separate entrance. At the back of the house was a yard where every family had a storage shed, and behind that, a garden allotment for growing vegetables. The house had a roof made of copper sheeting and was rendered on the outside. I still remember young children licking bits of mortar that had flaked away. Later, when I was at medical school, I realised that was probably how they got calcium in their diet from the lime in the mortar. About half the houses in the village had an outside toilet but ours was inside because the house had been built at the beginning of the twentieth century. In my teens, we were amongst the first in the village to get a bathroom and water heater. Before then Nana would heat up a tin bath once a week in the kitchen with water boiled on the coal fired stove.

Nana was like a second mother to me. She was a servant who couldn’t read or write but she was like a member of our family. As far as I know she did not suffer in the war, as she was a Catholic. After the war my brothers made sure that she was looked after and she lived in our flat where she died, a few years after the 1939-45 war. I last saw her in 1947, a happy and very sad visit.

Washing day was a big day. Clothes were cleaned with soap and a washing board in a giant tub. The laundry was pegged up in the yard, after which it was either ironed or mangled to soften it. If it rained, clothes could be dried in the attic, which was divided by slatted fences for each tenant. We never went on family holidays and the first time my father took a break was after his heart attack (when I was fourteen) and he went to Marienbad for health reasons. We boys were sometimes sent during our summer holidays to family in Poland or friends in Czechoslovakia. I lived in that house until I left for university in Brno at the age of 19 and then I would return for the long vacations.

My parents had grown up under the influence of the Emancipation. They were modern, influenced by the liberal movement in Germany. They loved the Austrian-Hapsburg royal family, German culture and read German newspapers. The Empire ended with the defeat of Austria-Hungary and the country my parents lived in now belonged to Czechoslovakia. Yet culturally they were really German, a tolerated minority. Judaism was their religion that they observed reasonably. Although they knew Yiddish, they spoke to us in German. We boys did not speak Yiddish but we understood some of it. "Our children don’t "yiddle" - they speak good German," they would say.

My father was a good-looking man, tall by the standards of the day. Every Sunday he went to a cafe house to play Taroque, a Central European card game.
My mother didn’t exactly follow fashion but she dressed well and bought material to be made up by the local seamstress. My mother did everything very fast and efficiently. She was the brain in the family. Businessmen would seek her advice.

Mother did all he cooking with Nana helping - nothing elaborate but good Jewish cooking. Nearly every Friday night we had chicken. This was quite a luxury - chickens were kept for laying, not eating, like they are today. My mother used the chicken or goose fat for schmaltz and also made boiled beef and tasty soup. Nothing was wasted - the goose feathers were used to make the family’s duvets.

On Shabbat, the candles were lit on the heavy oak dining table and my father made brocha. But we were not frum - the shop stayed open on Saturday. My father used to pray with tefillin but we boys didn’t and eventually he gave up. We had blue crockery for dairy and red for fleishig. My parents did not eat trev but we boys ate anything outside the home. But later, at university, I became a more conscious Jew and I avoided obvious tref.

Svibice had about three or four Jewish families, a barber, a publican, a cattle dealer and a hairdresser. We were not particularly close and I grew up with mostly non-Jewish friends.

Three times a year we would go to synagogue in Teschen, for the two days of Rosh Hashana and one of Yom Kippur. There were several synagogues in Teschen. Most of Jewish life was on the Polish side and it was only later that we attended the synagogue on the Czech side.

The one we attended on the Polish side was purpose built before the Great War, a bit churchy with a balcony for the ladies. It was not strictly orthodox - there were no special Cohanim blessings and the organ was not played on Saturdays. The prayers were all in Ivrit (Ashkenazi Hebrew) but the sermon was in German.

Quite a few of the congregation, like my parents, would carry on working on Shabbat. The one concession my father made was not to smoke on Shabbat. (Talking about smoking, sometimes my mother would have a cigar, on the odd evening).

We didn’t go to Sunday school but every week a pious man we called Uncle Schanzer would come to the house and give us individual lessons in Hebrew. We were not nice boys, we would run away when it was our time to be taught. As my Bar mitzvah grew closer, I studied with a semi-retired cantor from a synagogue in Teschen.

On the day of my Bar mitzvah in 1928 we walked from home in our Shabbat best and arrived at the synagogue on the Polish side of Teschen. The cantor steered me through my big day as I read Maftir.

In those days Bar mitzvahs were quiet affairs. There was a kiddush afterwards and, once back at home, I was given my first wristwatch - a precious, expensive thing.

When I was home from university, I would suggest going on a Saturday with my father to synagogue - it pleased him to arrive with his grown-up student son. By this time, his heart was bad and the walk that used to take ten minutes now took twice as long.

My earliest memory is concentrating on pulling an embroidery thread through paper at kindergarten when I was three years old. Proper school started at six. I was a bright kid, often top of the class. I went to elementary school in German and at eleven, I attended a Czech grammar state school or gymnasium. My best language became Czech and German became my second language.

I was a keen sportsman from an early age. I played tennis, table tennis, volley ball and soccer competitively, as well as ice-skating and skiing. Once a week we had a soccer match in an organised competition. When I was little I improvised a pair of skis with two slats from a wooden barrel and would ski down the little hill at the back of our house. When I was about sixteen I used to borrow Jacob’s old skis and go skiing in the nearby Beskyd mountains, a few stops away by train.

At German elementary school I was amongst the star pupils. When it was clear at my Czech grammar school that I had a good academic brain, my parents sent me to university.

My brothers were also bright but I was the only one to go to university - perhaps as the youngest I was a bit spoilt. In those days university was rare and costly since it required living away from home.

Jacob and Max left school at fourteen and fifteen respectively. Jacob continued in a business college for another two years. Both my brothers served an apprenticeship in the retail trade then later became representatives for factories and travelled away from home a lot. It was during the Depression and they had a hard time.

Anti-Semitism was illegal in Czechoslovakia and the rights of minorities were safeguarded. State schools existed for minorities in their own language, including a Hebrew grammar state school in the eastern part of Czechoslovakia. That did not stop me being called a "dirty Jew" on a couple of occasions. My relationship with people my own age, at school or sport was good. I could look after myself - I was sporty and handy with my fists.

After Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933, there were no posters or slogans because this was Czechoslovakia. But change was in the air. Certain Czech school friends began to distance themselves. It wasn’t hate - they were playing safe, I suppose.

One of my professors, an enlightened man, suggested that I study mining engineering and law because he felt I had the ability.
"Do you really think the local coal-owner would give me a job as a Jew?" I asked.
He patted my shoulder, silently, but with, I felt, genuine sympathy.

At grammar school I was a good Czech and I belonged to a strongly nationalist sports club. But even though I was not an observant Jew, I was seen as different. My eyes opened to anti-Semitism and I decided to join the Maccabi Sports Club where I felt I belonged. I became acquainted with the ideas of Zionism and I began to feel that this was the way forward. My parents were not pleased at first. The idea that a Czech citizen would want to live in a strange country did not appeal. They believed that our loyalty should be towards the country where we lived.

My eldest brother Jacob was not exactly a Zionist but he felt Jewish. In contrast, Max was not a happy Jew. He regretted his religion and culture and for some time identified as strongly German.

Our family was very much a democracy - we discussed everything together. We didn’t fall out over it because we loved each other and accepted each other’s differences. Gradually my parents realised that the world was changing and they supported my growing interest in Zionism.