Vida Neuwirthová

* 1962

  • "There is such a powerful moment at the very beginning. Before it all started, a friend of his took him to a fortune-teller, who was pretty successful, and traders would go to her to find out if they should do a good deal or not, if it would work or not, and she usually gave the right advice. So he ended up going there too, he didn't really trust her, the whole fortune telling and the predictions, but he went there. And she suddenly got very nervous, looking at the cards, and she said, 'Well, wow, you've got a long journey here, and it's dangerous, it's terrible, but you'll come back and then you'll catch up with everything and you'll have a wife and two children.' And of course, they had a big laugh at what the lady said... But then all through the war, when he was at his worst, he would say to these friends of his, 'Well, you're better off, you may quit here, but I've got to go the whole journey and come back home because the fortune-teller said that it would be all right eventually and I'd have a wife and two children.'"

  • "I think it's good, once we are here, to leave something behind, and not just a trace like 'I was here', but that I did something for society or for people, that it had some significance. And that's what I like so much in the works of Viktor Fischl, who writes that we're not just here as the jesters of someone who created us, but that we have some significance here, and that it's good, while we're still here, to enjoy every stone, every flower around us, of course, but also to do something for somebody else. I can't quite agree with what some people say, that if you do something for somebody else, good things will come back to you. I think for a lot of people that's not the case, that maybe they don't do anything for others and they're living pretty well, but I don't know if their life is that fulfilling. So I think that by doing something for somebody else or by realising that they left a footprint here, I think that then fulfills me as well, that we should be able to do something for somebody else and not expect anything in return."

  • "Up until about the age of fourteen I lived like a lot of other kids, although it was probably a bit harder at the time, you might not realise that until you're fourteen. And even less so for me, because I was in the Kühn Children's Choir from about the age of five, and we went to a lot of festivals abroad, so I even went many times where many other children and adults didn't get to go. So sometimes when I would ask my dad why he had a number on his hand, he would say with a smile that it was a phone number or that it was a number to heaven. It made me a little angry afterwards that I hadn’t seen through it at the time, how could it be that I was so ignorant that I didn't question it somehow more, but when they're your parents, you live together, you simply trust them. And life was great, so you're not ready for that at all. Back in school, Jewish history was barely talked about, so by then I was still a field unplowed."

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    Praha, 03.03.2022

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    délka: 02:09:57
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We‘re not here just for fun, I‘d like to leave a mark before I’m gone

Vida Neuwirthová, 3rd March 2022
Vida Neuwirthová, 3rd March 2022
zdroj: Post Bellum

Vida Neuwirthová was born on 10 July 1962 in Teplice into the family of Vítězslav Mojše Abeles, a Holocaust survivor, and Vida Šimková. Her father told her the truth about the number tattooed on his forearm on her fourteenth birthday, thus influencing her future direction. In the 1980s, she founded the children‘s theatre group Feigele at the Prague Jewish Community, which at the time was the only Prague activity intended for Jewish children. Vida Neuwirthová studied at a theatre faculty, then decided to become a puppeteer. However, the Czech public knows her primarily as the nosey princess Bosana from Werich‘s fairy tale The Three Veterans. As of 2022, she has devoted herself to children‘s theatre and guided tours of Jewish Prague and Terezín. She is the author of two fairy tale books for children with Jewish themes. In 2022 she lived in Prague.