Re: [Cz-L] Jewish WWI refugees in Bohemia

For what it's worth, my father never spoke of experiencing direct
antisemitism as such during this time.

Ironically, when the refugees were in Hungary around the time of the
High Holidays, he said, soldiers from Tirol and Vorarlberg were very
friendly, showed him pictures of their children, gave him chocolate,
etc. By contrast, the strictly observant Jews, angry that a train had
been allowed to travel over Rosh Hashanah and would not let the refugees
leave the train to get food and housing.

He did experience something perhaps related to antisemitism when going
to school in Bohemia: because middle-class Jewish refugees were
German-speaking, some of the Czech nationalist teachers tended to harass
them, associating them with the Empire. I gather that a lot of the
overtly antisemitic action was directed at the "unassimilated," very
pious, Yiddish-speaking rural Jews one sees in the photos on the exhibit
web site.

Jim

On 20/10/2014 12:37, Anny Matar wrote:
> What a moment to recall these horrors?!
> We were never liked, wherever we lived, it was an illusion and
> pipedream of safety during the K&K reign.
> I understand that during WWII Czeck soldiers saved some girls from
> Czernowitz to Prague. As far as I know the Czecks, not Slovanians,
> were much friendlier, was it so?
> Thanks for your mail, anny
>
> On Fri, Oct 17, 2014 at 11:39 AM, Jim Wald <jwald_at_hampshire.edu
> <mailto:jwald_at_hampshire.edu>> wrote:
>
> [Please remember to choose Plain Text before sending . . . ]
>
> Hi all.
>
> To my total surprise (after Shemini Atzeret yizkor today, of all
> times),
> I came across this.
>
> To be sure, by that time (already 1913), my father's family had
> left the
> Bukovina and moved to Galicia (the other relatives stayed in
> Bukovina),
> but it is still part of the general picture of the fate of the
> Bukovinian Jews under the Habsburg Empire.
>
> Jim
>
> A groundbreaking new exhibit at the Jewish Museum in Prague uses
> testimony from the Visual History Archive to explore the
> little-known fates of Jewish refugees in Bohemia and Moravia
> during
> World War I.
>
> The exhibit, titled "The Orient in Bohemia? Jewish Refugees During
> the First World War," will be on display at the Jewish Museum in
> Prague <http://www.jewishmuseum.cz/en/aorient_v_cechach.htm> until
> February 2015. 2014 marks the centennial anniversary of the
> beginning of World War I.
>
> Included in the exhibit is USC Shoah Foundation testimony of
> Jewish
> Holocaust survivors Jir(í Nezval and Max Wald -- the only
> audiovisual testimonies of these particular World War I refugees
> that researchers could find in the world. Wald and Nezval describe
> their families' experiences in Bohemia as refugees.
>
> The exhibit focuses on the first large group of refugees in modern
> history to arrive in the Bohemia region of Czechoslovakia.
> Hundreds
> of thousands of people fled or were evacuated from their homes in
> the World War I frontlines and arrived in the inner regions of the
> Habsburg monarchy, where they faced anti-Semitic campaigns and
> loss
> of rights.
>
> Through never-before-seen photographs, "The Orient in Bohemia?"
> illustrates the life of these refugees and refugee camps as
> well as
> the fascination locals had for Eastern European Jews and their
> different lifestyles and culture. Narrated excerpts from
> newspapers
> and other documents reveal the racial prejudices of the time
> and how
> the local population dealt with the refugees.
>
>
> http://sfi.usc.edu/news/2014/09/6356-testimony-featured-%e2%80%9c-orient-bohemia%e2%80%9d-exhibit-jewish-museum-prague
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Received on 2014-10-20 18:52:32