Petr Weber was most probably born as Yehuda Preiss on 1 March 1942 in the Polish town of Bochnia. He spent the beginning of his life in a Nazi-established Jewish ghetto. His parents fled the ghetto but were apparently betrayed and murdered, he was the only one who survived.
Another group of ghetto refugees found a two-year-old child in an abandoned forest hut. Coincidentally, Petr's uncle was among these refugees, who recognized the child and took it with him. After crossing the Polish-Slovak border, refugees faced many pitfalls; it was just after the suppression of the Slovak National Uprising. The uncle therefore left Petr with a local Jewish family, from where Anna, a family friend and a Christian, took him to her own family. He was safe in her Christian family.
The Weber family came from Bohemia, father Josef and mother Marie passed the boy off as their nephew and named him Petr. After the war, they moved back to Pilsen, where the father got a job in the Skoda factory.
The Webers did not hide his true identity from Petr, he knew they were not his biological parents. Because of him, they also kept in touch with the Jewish community in Pilsen throughout his childhood and adolescence. He found out more about the fate of his own parents only in 1966, when he was allowed to visit his distant relatives in Israel. The family wished him to stay in Israel but he did not find the courage to start new life in a foreign country. At that time Petr was an orphan again, the Webers died when he was seventeen.
After the Soviet invasion and occupation of Czechoslovakia, in 1971, he was fired from his job. He briefly made a living as a truck driver, then learned to program and became a programmer. After 1989, he actively participated in the life of the Jewish community in Brno, and was also its chairman.
The interview was recorded on 4 May 1996 in Kyjov.