“I am here because I was a bad girl. If I would have listened to my parents…” – “And were your parents members of some Zionist organization?” – “My father got the certificate Rasco, for those working in agriculture, and they told him that there was no need for advocates in Palestine, so he learned to grow chicken. He had a place here, he bought a place here to build a henhouse. My husband came a half year after me and he had visited my parents in Brno. We used to meet in Brno, even though I was only sixteen. So dad had the Rasco certificate.”
“It was very hard for me at the beginning. I only knew Shoshana, I did not know anybody else. At the beginning I contracted malaria. We had no rooms, we only had two rows of beds with mosquito nets. We only had a room for our clothes. I was lying on the ground on a blanket. It was very hard for me at the beginning. It was very hot to come from the middle of Europe in the summer time to the Emek ha-Yarden, to the Jordan Valley. It was very hot. There was no room, no ventilator, nothing.”
“So I wrote to the cultural department of the kibbutzim in Tel Aviv, and I asked them to came to the meeting of kibbutz every Shabat in the evening. To come and to explain to them that it was very important to have a music teacher, that it was very important for education. They said to me that I could teach there, but only for half a week.”
Chava Doron was born on March 24, 1923 in Brno as Eva Taussová. She comes from a Jewish family, her father Vladimír Tauss was a lawyer and her mother Olga was a housewife. Eva had sister Marta Rut, who was three years younger, and she studied at the Jewish Reform Grammar School in Brno and she was a member of the Zionist group Maccabi Hatzair. The family tried to relocate to Palestine before the war, but Eva Taussová was the only one who has received the certificate permitting her to go. She went through preparatory training for resettlement hakhshara in Brno and in March 1939 she went to Palestine. She lived in kibbutzim Degania, Kfar HaHoresh and Matzuva. In 1941 she married Alfred Drachmann, the son of the principal of the Jewish Grammar School in Brno, whom she had already known from Brno. They changed their surname to the Hebrew surname Doron and together they raised four children. Both her parents and her sister died in April 1942 in the extermination camp Rejowiec. Chava Doron worked as a music teacher, later she completed studies in music therapy and she worked with handicapped children. She received a recognition from the Israeli Ministry of Education and Culture for her work. She is a widow, she lives in Kfar Saba and she is happy about her fourteen grandchildren and twenty-five great-grandchildren.
