“The Swiss were very strict about allowing somebody to live or work there. (…) If we had stayed there a bit longer, perhaps we would have received housing the official way. But my husband was keen to get out of Europe. Brazil gave us visas immediately. We had ‘one-way’ refugee passports. My husband was a machine engineer, I had studied agricultural school, and we received the visas immediately. (...) We rather wanted to go to an English-speaking country, to Canada, Australia, America, even to South Africa. It was difficult everywhere, and America was the most difficult. (…) We lived in a democratic country (Switzerland), and we thus had regular Czechoslovak visas. The Brazilians extended it twice for us, but then they said that they would not extend it again, unless they asked about it in the capital, which was still in Rio at that time. We thus decided that we would rather go to Brazil. That was in August 1949.”
“(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.”
“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.”
“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.”
Karla Katschnerová, née Loevensteinová, was born in 1923 in Prague as the second daughter of the Czech lawyer, economist and long-time general manager of the Škoda factory Karel Loevenstein (1885-1938). Her father was one of the most important figures in Czechoslovak economy between the wars. Karla studied grammar school in Prague at first, but during the war her family moved to Dobřenice near Hradec Králové where she continued her study at the agricultural school in Chrudim and in Hradec Králové-Kukleny. In May 1948 she emigrated and she followed her husband-to-be, machinery engineer Milan Katschner. In order to leave the country, she went on a business trip to Turkey via Italy. She lived in Switzerland for several months and she married Milan there. In August 1949 Mr. and Mrs. Katschner went to Brazil and they settled in São Paulo. After more than forty years of living in Brazil and after the death of her husband, Karla Katschnerová decided to return to the Czech Republic. From the mid-1990s she has been permanently living in Prague and in Dobřenice. With her son Rodrigo she works on the restoration of a little château in Dobřenice which her father bought in 1928 as a family home and which she received in a desolate state in restitution in 1993. She died in October 2018.
