Ota Vital was born in May 1890 in Ústí nad Labem as Otto Weinberg. He had a brother, Viktor, and a sister, Eliška. Two other siblings died in infancy. He lived and worked with his wife Luisa in London and Spain, where he changed his name. In 1932, his twin sons Alexander and George were born in Malaga, later on, in Czechoslovakia, they would use names Aleš and Jiří. Ota returned to Ústí as a successful businessman.
Immediately after the annexation of Sudetenland, he was arrested along with several other Jews, and after his release, he fled with his family to Prague. Thanks to his marriage to an “Aryan” woman, both he and his sons were protected from deportation, but as “half-breeds” the boys were not allowed to go to school. In January 1945, the protection of “mixed marriages” expired and Ota was deported to the ghetto in Terezín.
After the war, the Vital family was one of those registered with UNRRA for voluntary deportation to the American occupation zone of Germany. This time, his marriage was problematic as "mixed" with a German woman.
Read the Vital family's questionnaire, completed for UNRRA in English.
From the extended Weinberg and Heller family, apart from Otto, surviving thanks to his “mixed marriage”, there were only two survivors: brother Viktor and his son Felix, author of the book I Was Number 30529, who survived deportation and several concentration camps.
Viktor’s wife Marie was murdered just before liberation, his second son Hans was murdered in July 1944, his father Karel died in the Terezín ghetto, the traces of sister Eliška and her children disappear in Auschwitz sometime in February 1943, three aunts were murdered in Treblinka.