Jan Mayer was born on 13 April 1925 in Moravská Ostrava.
He attended the Jewish elementary school and later attended the classical grammar school in Ostrava. After the Nazi occupation, he had to transfer to the Jewish high school in Brno - the only high school in the country where students identified as Jews were still allowed to study.
After his deportation to Terezín, he was deported together with his father, uncle and brother to Auschwitz-Birkenau. There, he and his brother signed up to work as cabinetmakers and were transported to a labor camp near Gliwice. On 19 January 1945, they had to march in bitter cold to the Blechhammer concentration camp. After liberation by the Red Army, they reached Budapest via Uzhhorod, where they stayed for some time. After the liberation of Ostrava, they decided to return home.
Jan Mayer, his brother and friends were the first Jews to return to Ostrava from the concentration camps. However, there was a Russian headquarters in his family home, so he and his brother had to find a new apartment. In 1946 he completed his studies and passed the examination for the school-leaving certificate. In 1947-49 he did his compulsory military service, and after he returned, he worked in a timber company, which before nationalisation belonged to his father. In later years he also worked for the Jewish community in Ostrava.
The interview was filmed on 7 May 1996 in Ostrava.
Gerda Pavlíková, née Reiková, was born on 17 April 1918 in Ostrava.
She attended a Jewish school, then the family moved to Vienna because there were better job opportunities. She studied at a so-called “reálné gymnázium" (in German Realgymnasium)”, a high school stressing modern languages, maths and science, but did not graduate and learned the trade of a dressmaker.
Her parents were Zionists, they wanted to go to Palestine and build the Jewish state there. Gerda was also a Zionist, her husband Bedřich Lanzer was involved in the Jugend-Alijah movement (Youth Aliyah, aliyah is the Hebrew word for immigration to Israel) which organized illegal escapes by boat on the Danube and then by sea to Palestine. While her parents settled in the port of Haifa, Gerda and her husband were no longer able to leave for Palestine. She never saw her parents again.
When the Jewish community in Ostrava organized illegal youth education, they invited Gerda and her husband to conduct classes there. Both of them were deported in the fourth Ostrava transport to Terezín. There, Gerda lived to see the end of the war.
In 1946, she married a second time to Pavel Pavlik who regained ownership of the textile shop on Wenceslas Square, where Gerda worked as a shop assistant until the shop was confiscated by the communists. Later she worked as a shop assistant in various shops in Prague.
The interview was recorded on 29 January 1997 in Prague.
Ervin Krumholz was born on 21 April 1924 in Moravská Ostrava.
He grew up as the only child. After completing the Jewish elementary school, he started to study at a high school which, however, he had to leave in 1940 and started apprenticeship training to become a car mechanic. Before the war, he was active in the Jewish organizations Maccabi Hatzair and Techelet-Lavan.
In September 1943, he and his mother were deported to the ghetto in Terezín, and in December of the same year they were both deported to the so-called Terezín family camp in Auschwitz-Birkenau. Ervin managed to survive the liquidation of the family camp, and was selected for slave labor in the Blechhammer camp.
After the war, he returned to Ostrava, where, after several years of separation, he met his father who had been deported to Nisko and returned to Ostrava as a liberator. Ervin got married and emigrated to Israel with his wife Helena in February 1949. There he worked as a truck driver. In 1953, he and his family moved to Canada, where Ervin worked as a car mechanic.
The interview was filmed on 12 June 1996 in Richmond Hill, Ontario, Canada.