Julius and Julia Steiner and Irma Weissova and family

This is the photo of the family of my great-grandparents Július (center) and Júlia Steiner. My great-grandmother was said to have lived to be 103. This picture was probably taken in 1923. My great-grandparents had 10 children, one of whom was my grandmother Irma Weissová. She was born in 1882 in Prievidza. She had seven children; her daughter is my mother, Edita Weissova Silberstein. My mother was born in Prievidza in 1918. She died in Kosice in 1995. In this photo, she is the first one in the second row; she is sitting with her mother. My maternal grandfather was Adolf Weiss. He died in 1920, at the age of 43, in a traffic accident while driving a horse carriage. Most of my grandmother's children survived World War II. Her oldest son, Vojtech, was a lawyer. Before the war, he went with his brothers to Tanger, Morocco. They were businessmen in some international trading zone. The second son, Alexander, spent the war years in Indochina and Saigon, Vietnam. Edmund and Ladislav were in Morocco when the war broke out in Europe. You could say that their business saved their lives. By working abroad, they avoided deportations and the Holocaust. After liberation, Ladislav came back as an enthusiastic builder of Czechoslovakia. Nevertheless, he was persecuted, fired from his work, and forced to find a job as an unskilled worker. After some time, he was rehabilitated. Today he lives in Prague and is married to a woman who is not Jewish. Another son, Tibor, worked as a sales representative for a company in Slovakia. He was deported from Zilina and died in Auschwitz. My parents, grandmother and my Aunt Josefína all survived in hiding. My father, Tibor Silberstein, was born in Kremnica in 1914. He was a businessman. In World War II, he also was in the anti-fascist resistance. I was born in 1949 in Kosice. I learned I was Jewish when I was 6 and at school for the first time. A girl mocked me for being a Jew. I had no idea what it meant and why she was making fun of me. I only understood that it was some mockery. I reacted very simply and physically attacked her, not driven by the meaning of an insult at all. I probably beat her and she complained at home. When the case was examined, since her parents came to school complaining that I had hurt their daughter, the teacher had to examine the origin of the conflict. I told her exactly how it all had started. I learned for the first time that there is something called Jewry and Jew.