Lydia Tischlerová

* 1929

  • "I had many friends from Terezín and from Ostrava who went to Israel after the war and were in various kibbutzim. And I remember going to one kibbutz with one... he was actually my cousin's cousin. And we came to that kibbutz, there were a lot of people who survived Terezín and probably other concentration camps too. But I knew them from Terezín. And when I met them, I started to say: 'You remember, don't you?' Then when we went away, he - what was his name? I don't remember... - he said: 'You know, Lída, we don't encourage people here to talk about their experiences.' I just didn't understand how they could suppress it. But it was taboo! There they really... They, the clever psychologists all together - and there were quite a few of them in that Israel - thought that people would just forget about it. And it was only after the Eichmann trial that the lid was opened and people started talking about it. So that was quite strange to me. For me, the analysis was very... it helped me a lot to be able to process the whole thing."

  • "I don't know how it got there, but there were stories in Terezín that there were gas chambers in Auschwitz. And people didn't want to believe it. It's just... it's such a barrier to somehow survive. And so, when one went... in the beginning, the transports... people still from Auschwitz had to send compulsory notes about how well they were doing there. And apparently some people made a code that if the two crosses were on the left corner, there were gas chambers, and if they were on the right corner, there weren't. The tickets came in with the crosses on the left corner, and people just denied it: that was a mistake, that's not true. So, it was known, and it wasn't known."

  • "In our apartment, where we lived, they put an officer from the Luftwaffe, from the air force. And he, too, when he learned that my mother got up at three in the morning, he also brought us bread. So, you know, what was even more remarkable at that time was that the way the SS behaved and the way the army behaved was something completely different. The army still behaved like people, decently, whereas the SS, what they did there, it's indescribable."

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    Praha, 20.09.2021

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    Praha, 21.09.2021

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    duration: 52:09
    media recorded in project Stories of the 20th Century TV
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Psychoanalysis helped her process the trauma of the Holocaust

Graduation celebration at Birbeck College, London, 1953
Graduation celebration at Birbeck College, London, 1953
photo: Archiv pamětnice

Lydia Tischler was born on 1 January 1929 in Moravská Ostrava. Both her parents, her father Sigmund Folkart and her mother Alžběta, née Morvajová, were Jewish. After 15 March 1939, when German soldiers marched into Ostrava, her father fled to England via Poland. His mother, Lydia and older daughter Ruth tried to follow him, but the beginning of the war caught them in Krakow, Poland. They were unable to travel west. They stayed in Krakow until April 1940 and then fled back to Ostrava. The mother then had to entrust her daughters to the care of Jewish orphanages in Prague. In September 1942, they received a summons for transport to Terezín and went there together with other relatives from Ostrava. Lydia’s paternal grandparents died in Terezín, and other relatives perished in Sobibor and Majdanek. Lydia, her mother and sister were deported to Auschwitz on 23 October 1944, and her mother, Alžběta, was murdered by the Nazis in the gas chamber immediately after her arrival. After three days in Auschwitz, Lydia and Ruth were sent to the Oederan labour camp near Chemnitz. At the end of the war, they were transported back to Terezín, where they were both liberated. After the war, the witness attended a convalescent stay organized by Přemysl Pitter, where she took care of the younger children. It was here that she realized that she wanted to take care of children in the future. Lydia travelled to the UK to her father. She completed her university degree, underwent training in psychoanalysis with Anna Freud and became a child psychotherapist in the psychoanalytic direction. In 1993 she co-founded the training in psychoanalytic psychotherapy for children and adolescents in the Czech Republic.