“I have resisted it strongly, when my brother told me that it was these problems I had had. But I believe it, that something like this exists. That survivor guilt exists and that ‘if I’m alone, I won’t survive’. The survivor guilt manifests itself in such ways that when you’re doing well – I hope that stopped thanks to the help of a psychiatrist and a psychologist – when I was doing well I would do something so that I wouldn’t be doing well anymore. Either I’d have some injury, I’ve had so many injuries, or I’d mess something up, get in fights with people and then I wouldn’t be well anymore. And the fear of being alone, I struggle with that. In today’s world it’s practically unreal, I’m able to survive on my own and manage and handle everything myself. But it just... it’s there.”
“Roubicek comes to the rabbi and says: ‘Rabbi, I cannot stand it anymore. Two-room apartment, I live there with my wife, two kids and now my mother-in-law has moved in.’ Rabbi says: ‘You know what, buy three pigeons and move them in your apartment.’ Okay. So Roubicek does this, a week later he is back to see the rabbi and says: ‘Look, it’s unbearable. Two-room apartment, family, two kids, mother-in-law, three pigeons shitting all over the place.’ Rabbi says: ‘Roubicek, buy also two goats.’ Roubicek buys the goats, puts them in the apartment. One-week later Roubicek returns and says: ‘Rabbi, it’s insufferable, family, two kids, mother-in-law, three pigeons shitting everywhere, goats stink, I can’t open the windows because of the pigeons. Insufferable!’ Rabbi says: ‘Roubicek, go home, let the pigeons out, put the goats away.’ Roubicek comes back and says: ‘Rabbi, my apartment has never been bigger!’”
“My brother and I were driving our dad to Prague on the 19th, he had a panic attack on the way and back then I didn’t understand what was going on. We arrived in Prague and brought him to the Jewish retirement house in Janovský street, I cleaned and I said to myself that I’d put everything that reminded him of mum on the side. I bought all the things he liked. The next day we woke up early in the morning, he was still in his nightclothes, in a dressing gown, with slippers on. I told him we were just going to drop-in to visit some friends in Pradubice and that we would be back early in the afternoon. Well and we left. When we arrived there, Libuška took me in her arms and said: ‘Dad jumped out of a window.’ So, we drove back.
They didn’t show him to us at all, I don’t know what they had done with his wedding ring, it just disappeared. I later learned what had happened from Irka, his cousin. Dad, which was completely out of his character – he never ever left the door untidy – he left the ground floor where his rooms were in the dressing gown and slippers, went to the elevator and rode to the fifth floor to see Irka, for breakfast, he said. She was just mopping the bathroom floor and told him, Richard, Pavla had bought you everything, you have it all downstairs, I’ll just finish up mopping this little piece here and will come down to join you for breakfast. Dad said OK, left her apartment and instead of going to the elevator, he walked half-a-floor up and jumped out of a window. And back then, I didn’t understand him.”
“(During the lecture, father) said: ‘A transport came. And we had to walk the older people, who couldn’t walk that fast anymore, to get them shot. And when I was walking with one old lady, I was wondering what I’d do if they brought my grandmother here.’ I still don’t understand how could my father had processed all that he had lived through there, because he was an amazing father.”
Daughter of Richard Glazar, who was one of the few people to survive the horrors of the Treblinka extermination camp, was born October 17, 1952 in Prague. She had had a calm childhood living with her family in her mother’s grandparents’ house in the residential Ořechovka area. Her father’s war experiences were practically a taboo at home, she only realized the full extent of it during his lectures in the 1990s, on which she accompanied him. In February 1969 the whole family emigrated to Switzerland. Pavla Glazarová didn’t finish her gymnasium studies in Bern and worked as a computer programmer. She married at age nineteen but divorced seven years after. She had had a very close relationship with her parents up until their death in December 1997. She has struggled with the trauma of a second-generation Holocaust survivor her whole life and has tried to fight it with the help of psychologists. She is an active biker and also works as a rock band driver.
