Elisheva Gidron, roz. Kummermann

* 1920

  • “I was lucky. There was a big house in the middle of the city, but while we were there, they put a wooden fence around it, so we couldn’t go anywhere. But they changed it when the people from the Red Cross came to see what was happening in Terezín in 1944- So they pulled down the fence, and suddenly it was nice.”

  • “On 1 October 1944 I was sent to Auschwitz, that is Osvětim in Czech. I’m sure you know about it. I was very lucky because I was only there a month, and we didn’t work either. We stood for hours in rows of five because five is an easy number to count by - five, ten, fifteen, and so on. Each day they wrote down how many people there were, and when there were only four somewhere, it meant that someone had died.”

  • “I went to the funeral, and I was sad because I loved my husband. Then I left Czechoslovakia. No one from my big family came back from the concentration camps. But I came back.”

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    kibuc Sde Nehemja, Izrael, 05.11.2016

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    duration: 56:58
    media recorded in project Stories of 20th Century
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Our parents became Zionists thanks to us

Lisa Kumermann (Elisheva Gidron). 1946.
Lisa Kumermann (Elisheva Gidron). 1946.
photo: Archiv pamětnice- dodala Jitka Radkovičová

Elisheva Gidron was born on 4 December 1920 in Vienna as Elisabeth (Lisa, Alžběta) Kummermann. She comes from a Jewish family; she had an elder brother, Herbert. Her father was a mechanical engineer, and his job made the family move to Štěpánovice near Olomouc in 1926. In 1932 the Kummermanns moved to Karlovy Vary, but after the Sudetes were annexed they withdrew to Prague in October 1938. The witness was barred from finishing grammar school, in 1940-1941 she worked at the House for the Mentally Ill in Hloubětín. In September 1942 she was deported to the Terezín ghetto, where she worked as a governess in a house for girls aged thirteen to fifteen. In October 1944 she was taken to Auschwitz, where she stayed for about four weeks before being chosen for the labour camp in Zakrze-Kudowa, an auxilliary of Gross-Rosen. She was liberated in Kudowa in April 1945. She returned to Prague, where she met Jakov Wurzel, a member of the Zionist movement Tchelet Lavan, whom she had first met in Terezín. They married in May 1945. Her husband died soon after the wedding, and after his death the witness emigrated to Palestine in April 1946 - following her brother’s emigration in 1938 and her parents’ also. She lived in the kibbutz of Neot Mordechai and later in the kibbutz of Sde Nechemya. Elisheva Gidron has three sons, she is a widow, and she lives in Sde Nechemya.