"I remember suffering from many illnesses there. The thing that bothered me the most was recurrent otitis media. My friend Petr Haimann always reminds me of how he envied me being allowed to cry since his mother wouldn't let him cry when he was sick. Then they took me to the hospital and said they were going to operate on me, and I still admire those doctors to this day for what they were able to do back then. It was eighty years ago, there were no antibiotics, only the equipment that was there. They chose to do it by craniotomy. They cut the head open on both sides and cleaned it out. I haven't had a problem with my ears since. They anesthetized me before the surgery using ether. They put gauze on my nose and dripped ether on it and waited for me to pass out. There was a young doctor with me to check me falling asleep, and he would talk to me and I don't know how little things like that just stick in one's mind. He asked me where I lived, and I told him my grandfather built the house and it was green. He told me not to make it up, saying I must have looked at it with green glasses in the summer. The house still has the original green plaster. The second thing I remember is my grandfather coming to see me, my mother's father. They went through Terezín and then they ended up badly. He brought me an orange, which was unheard of in Terezín. The Red Cross would send shipments with things like that. I don't know how they were distributed; maybe he had to give something of his own in exchagne. It was the first orange I remember in my life, and I always see my grandfather holding an orange when I go to a store and see oranges."
"It was this horrible room, it looked like a garage, and people had to stuff their own mattresses in there. There were piles of straw inside and that's where they stuffed them. Then they divided us up so that I remember we lived in this little room, there were these bunk beds, three next to each other. There was always a mother and child living there. Families couldn't stay together. Men had to live separately. I lived there with my mother. The other couple that lived there was Petr Haimann and his mother, he's a year younger and he's also a survivor, he lives in Brno. And then there was another lady with a little girl."
"I remember sleeping inside [the school]; we were there for two or three days. We had to come on 2 December and went to the station on the night of 5 December. I recall this gymnasium with mattresses on the floor and a lot of people. And then I remember leaving the school; we were standing in the hallway in a column of threes. Everybody had the luggage they were allowed to take and German soldiers walked around us like guards. I recalled the corridor was curved but I wasn't sure. And so a few years ago, already an old man, I went to see that school. The lady in the principal's office took me down and indeed, there was a hallway where we stood, it was curved, and she showed me the gym."
"This is a postal card we received when we were temporarily living in Ponávka. This postal card tells us to report in the school on Merhautova Street."
Jiří Hála, né Hahn, was born in Brno before the Second World War, on 21 April 1937, into a Jewish family of Oskar and Blanka Hahns. On 5 December 1941, the entire family was deported to Terezín except for their grandfather who had perished earlier in Mauthausen. Jiří Hála describes life in Terezín and the return to Brno. Just he and his parents came back. The communists nationalized his parents‘ shop but they continued working there. In 1948 they changed their surname from Hahn to Hála. Jiří Hála graduated from a chemistry high school and then from the Faculty of Science of Masaryk University (known as the Jan Evangelista Purkyně University in Brno in 1960-1990), majoring in nuclear chemistry. In 1968-1970 he was on a fellowship at the University of Vancouver, Canada. He and his wife chose not to emigrate because of their parents. From 1970 onwards, the State Security Service (StB) filed him as a conscious collaborator in the informer/agent category. However, Jiří Hála rejects this. After 1989, he served as a Vice-Rector of Masaryk University for three years. He lived in Brno in 2023.
Hrdinové 20. století odcházejí. Nesmíme zapomenout. Dokumentujeme a vyprávíme jejich příběhy. Záleží vám na odkazu minulých generací, na občanských postojích, demokracii a vzdělávání? Pomozte nám!
