PhDr. Charles Ota Heller

My father chose a day - Jan Masaryk´s funeral - without telling me. There were rumours that there were probably gonna be riots and they might bring in some soldiers that were guarding the border to Prague. So we drove west and ended up in Aš. We gave our car, an American Ford, to the people who were helping us, we took a bus and a train and got to a small village. A farmer picked us up and took us to his farm. He said we had to wait till midnight and then he would take us to the forest and show us the way. The farmer actually stole one of our four suitcases. At midnight after my father yelled at the farmer who denied stealing it, we finally went to the edge of the forest. The farmer pointed in a certain direction and said OK, start walking. You´ll walk for about 3 hours and if they don´t shoot you first, you´ll be in the US zone in Germany. It was scary, it was dark and we kept tripping over stones and wood. By this time I knew we were escaping and father explained to me why. I was 12 at this point so I could understand.

I was born on 25th January 1936, my father was Rudolf Heller and my mother Ilona Hellerová, whose maiden name was Neumannová. We lived in a little village Kojetice some 11km from Prague. My great grandfather Gustav Neumann came to Kojetice in the early 1900s, he opened a general store selling everything from brooms, bread and clothes to newspapers. Later he started manufacturing clothes: He became the first importer of Singer sewing machines into Czechoslovakia and various ladies who lived in the area of Kojetice and Líbeznice were sewing dresses in their homes on sewing machines my great grandfather had provided for them and by 1925/26 my great grandfather had a firm which became the largest manufacturer of women´s dresses and men´s workclothes in all of Central Europe. My father, who lived in Kralupy, finished studies at Business School in Prague and went to work for my great grandfather in Kojetice. He fell in love with the boss´s granddaughter. They were married on Staroměstská radnice in 1934 and I was born two years later.

We lived in a strange household because my mother´s parents never married. Her father, Artur, son of Gustav Neumann, was a Jew and her mother, Marie Kozuschnikova, was a Sudeten German from Ostrava and a Catholic. My mother was baptised as a Catholic after she was born in Vienna and adopted by Artur. Her mother never lived with us. On the Jewish side, our household in Kojetice consisted of my great grandfather, my grandfather, his brother and my father. I was a devout Catholic boy and went to mass with my mother to church across the street from our home. Religion was never discussed in my family. The Jewish members of our household were completely secular, they never went to synagogue, they never spoke Yiddish or Hebrew. They were patriotic Czechs who spoke only Czech, all of them. We celebrated Easter, we celebrated Christmas and I never thought of our family as anything but everyone in our village. And I was happy to be like everybody else. I never thought otherwise.

It was in March 1939. I was only 3 years old but in conversations over dinner table I could hear that something was wrong. Various relatives from other areas, different places like Kralupy and area around Kralupy started coming to visit us and started to disappear. I had no idea why and I was told not to ask. Finally, my father disappeared. He escaped with the intent to fight against the Nazis. He ended up in Beograde waiting for the partisans to help him, eventually to get him out to Palestine. He was seen by a policeman in a park with an English newspaper. He arrested him thinking he was a spy, while my father was actually learning English. He spent two weeks in prison and when the day of the trial came, a guard took him to a waiting room of the courthouse. He told him he was a partisan and he would turn his back so that my father could disappear, which he did. He hid in a coal cellar, then went to the South to the seaside pretending he was a tourist. When the air was clear, he went back to Beograd, connected with partisans and via Greece and Turkey he eventually ended up in Jaffa as one of the first volunteers in the Czechoslovak Brigade of the British Army. And from there he fought in North Africa under Montgomery where he was twice at two sieges of Tobruk. Eventually, they were evacuated and taken to England, he was at Dunkerque, he was in the Invasion.