Karla Katschnerová-Loevensteinová

“Some time after the war we received it back. They could not accuse us of being collaborationists or something like that. We were supposed to have it returned, but then suddenly it became administered by the state administration. I spent most of my time trying to get rid of the administrators; I was about twenty-two at that time. I was a bit naïve to think that everything would be as it used to be. But it my effort was probably in vain, and we only succeeded in 1947. Then we were not allowed to participate in the Marshall Plan and everything then took its own direction.”

“(You father was of Jewish origin?) My grandfather was of Jewish origin, and his name was Arnošt Loevenstein. He married a woman from the Richter family from Hradec. Her family owned a textile shop on the Grand Square in Hradec. When my grandfather wanted to marry this Ludmila, her father told him that he would allow her to marry him, but that grandpa would need to be baptized, because they were a religious family. Grandpa thus later became baptized. One Jew later told me that grandpa had had to love her very much if he had agreed to be baptized. The whole family then continued in the Catholic tradition, and they did not care about the Jewish faith at all. (…) People often thought that he was a Jew just because of his name. Nobody enquired whether he was a Jew or a half-Jew. Naturally, when Germans came and I was in the boarding school in Switzerland, my mother insisted that I stay there and do not come back. I was a little over fifteen, and I wanted to return home at all costs. (…) At the beginning before the Nuremberg laws the ‘quarter-Jews’ were not affected. If it had taken longer, perhaps we would have been affected as well, just as it happened to some mixed Jewish families.”

“I travelled here in 1991, I think. When I saw the yard and its ‘delabré’ (devastated) state, as the French call it, I thought about how could one finance it to put it back to shape. I was a bit shocked by that. And I went to Switzerland where I met my son and my friends from Lausanne and Basel who arrived there to see me. (...) They were all telling me: you need to take it, because if you had not, some communists or racketeers would have gotten it instead, and you would then be angry. Just take it. And so I applied for a restitution process in order to make it in time.”