Alfred Hartmann
Alfred Hartmann was born on December 30, 1914. He grew up in Těšín, Poland, where his father owned a wine shop. He went to a German school and later to a Polish trade school. He briefly participated in the activities of the Zionist Hashomer Hatzair movement, but was not interested in politics. He played football for the Czech club SK Těšín, later moving to the Czech side of town.
He was actively involved in helping Jewish refugees from Nazism who were heading west or east through Poland after the occupation of the rest of Czechoslovakia. After the start of World War II, he became a refugee himself, heading for Soviet-occupied Polish territory.
He settled in Lwów, married. Then he was arrested by the Soviet secret police and deported with his wife to Siberia, to Tyumen, where he was put to forced labour, later deported to Omsk. Like thousands of other Czechoslovak prisoners in the Gulag, he was released after the formation of the Czechoslovak army unit in Buzuluk. With this eastern exile army he returned to his homeland and settled in Prague. In the 1950s he was imprisoned again, worked in the uranium mines in Jáchymov.
The interview was recorded on 16 July 1996 in Prague.
Walter Ziffer
Walter Ziffer was born on 5 March 1927 in Těšín, Poland, and grew up in Český Těšín, where his father was one of the prominent lawyers and leaders of the Jewish community. After the outbreak of the Second World War, like other Jews, they were expelled from the house where they lived, the house was taken over by the Gestapo as the local headquarters.
In the spring of 1940, he and his family were moved to the Jewish ghetto established on the former Polish side of the town, on Beaver Hill, and were put to forced labor. In June 1941 he was deported to the first of the concentration camps he survived: they were named Sosnowitz, Schmiedeberg, Sakrau, Nimptsch, Klettendorf, Gräditz, Brande and Waldenburg. He lived to see the liberation of Waldenburg on May 8, 1945.
The rest of his family gradually returned to Český Těšín from other camps, but Walter did not want to stay in Czechoslovakia. Before the communist seizure of power, he emigrated first to France, then to the United States. He graduated from university, worked at General Motors, then became a Catholic missionary and a professor of theology. It was not until the second half of his life that he began to return to his Jewish roots.
The interview was filmed on 21 October 1997 in Weaverville, North Carolina, USA.