“What is so special about being a Jew compared to other people? It is hard to say. Psychologically speaking, it is certainly a certain feeling of being persecuted. I came to Israel and they were asking me: ‘What does it mean for you to be a Jew over there in Slovakia, in central Europe?’ (...) Being a Jew is a psychological complex. It is a psychological disorder somewhere deep within the soul and Israel is the therapy for it. You no loner need to be ashamed for who you are. (...) Jews used to say you are ‘unsere’ (ours), instead of saying ‘You area Jew.’ It was like a watchword. When I was in Prague as a young man, somebody asked me the way to the cemetery. (...) I didn’t know that there was an important cemetery in Prague, because I was not part of the Prague Jewish culture; I rather belonged to the Hungarian one in Budapest. (...) I thus asked the man: ‘Are you unsere?’ He didn’t know what I was talking about.”
“Already as children we were growing up with the feeling that our place was in Israel. Our mother had a large family in Israel, her sisters and brother were there. (…) My entire life had been aimed at emigrating to Israel. I don’t know if emigration is usually regarded as leaving one’s home, but I didn’t feel it that way. Dunajská Streda did not give me a feeling of home, although it was the town where I was born and where my ancestors were born. At least part of my ancestors had lived there for over two hundred years. I had been preparing myself to leave the next day after I have graduated from secondary school, and it really happened (...) I could speak some German and I was bilingual in Hungarian and Slovak.”
“Half of inhabitants of Dunajská Streda were Jews. There were too many of them for that place and the only area they could engage in was trade with agricultural products. Most of them merely eked out a living, they were certainly not wealthy. The more successful or more courageous of them later began to deal in speculations. As an economist I can see that they were buying wheat before it got ripe, using purchasing options. They were buying it from farmers who needed money, for example to hire labourers. The Jews thus paid a fixed price upfront, and if the price of wheat then increased, they earned money on it. They usually got some discounts, and they could thus make a profit. My grandpa was involved in this trade in Horní Saliby, and so was his brother. But it seems that they suffered a loss on wheat after the war, and he went bankrupt.”
“They always kept telling me that I was the reason for it, because I was born in 1949 and my mom was pregnant with me; although it is true that they could not know that the communists would close the borders. Most of families left. I think that my father never wanted to leave. He felt to be a part of the area and of the suffering, and perhaps he also had some positive memories of things he had experienced there (in southern Slovakia, auth.’s note), and this was probably more attractive for him than Israel. He was a very rational person and he claimed that Israel did not have a chance to survive and that it was too hot there, and other rational excuses like that.”
“The fate of the 20th century and the suffering of our parents is more interesting than our fate (...) It is a kind of an academic perspective, I think. We were born into a community that - culture-wise - basically no longer existed at the time. It was dying and merely surviving. We were yet growing up with tales which told about the life before the war. But personally as I see it, one’s human fate as well as the history of the world is divided into two parts: the part before World War Two and the part after it. The part before is complete: there are families, grandmothers, normal human relations. What follows is a world which is already broken. If I were to compare it to colours, I would say: ‘This part is lit by the Sun, and the other one is already in darkness.’”
One’s life, as well as the history of the world, are divided in two parts. The part before World War Two and the part after it
Eugen Roden roz. Loewy
photo: dobová : z roku 1963 současná : z natáčení
photo: dobová : z roku 1963 současná : z natáčení
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Eugen Roden was born as Eugen Loewy in 1949 in Dunajská Streda in southern Slovakia in a Hungarian speaking Jewish family. Both his parents, mother Ida Kauferová and father Alfréd Loewy, have survived the holocaust. His paternal grandfather came from Transylvania in present-day Rumania, and his maternal grandfather was from the Slovak part of Hungary. Eugen’s father survived the Second World War in labour camps of the Hungarian army, and his mother and her four sisters have survived Auschwitz, slave labour in factories and the death march to the camp in Ravensbrück. Eugen’s parents settled in Dunajská Streda after the war and started a family. Their daughter Alžběta was born in 1947 and their son Eugen in 1949. He learnt the car repairman’s trade and then he did a long-distance study of secondary school which he successfully completed. At the end of the 1960s he changed his surname from Loewy to Roden, which sounded less Jewish. He did not want to live in Czechoslovakia and after his sister Alžběta had emigrated to Israel in 1967 he had no reason to stay there. Following his graduation from secondary school in summer 1968, before the Soviet invasion to Czechoslovakia, Eugen went to Vienna and from there directly to Israel. He did not tell anything to his parents because he did not want them to prevent him from emigrating. He quickly integrated into the Israeli society, graduated in economics and did his military service and then he worked as an advisor at the ministry of finance for many years. He became an expert on budget planning and social security. Both his parents legally emigrated to join their children in Israel at the turn of the 1970s and 1980s. For personal reasons, Eugen Roden moved to Prague in the 1990s. He still lives in Prague, where he invited several Israeli investors and where he worked with several investment companies. One of the most important projects in which he was involved is the shopping mall Flora in Prague-Vinohrady.
