Věra Wiener

* 1924

  • [Were you able to exchange letters with your parents afterwards?] “Yeah, we would write to each other. They deported them in the autumn of 1942. We stayed in touch during the two years I lived in Denmark. One of the last letters my dad sent me from Theresienstadt was missing a lot of words. They had been blacked out by the censorship. Unfortunately that letter got lost.”

  • “I came from Bohemia to Denmark when I was sixteen years old. Then I continued to Sweden. There, I married one of my friends and when I was thirty, my husband died. So I took all of my belongings and went to Israel because I had some relatives there. In Israel, I got to know my second husband. I stayed in a Kibbutz for a short time and then we left to Haifa because I didn’t like it there too much. We then worked in Haifa.”

  • “At that point I was already dating my boyfriend. One day, we went cycling to the north shore, to an island called Sjælland, where the fishermen worked. We walked on the street and stopped a random stranger, asking him if he could help us to flee to Sweden. It was a random strange man. He asked if we were Jews and we said yes. He said: ‘so come with me’. He took us to his house and hid us there. It was organized. We’d go there and back and eventually they took us to Copenhagen to the ship port and hid us on a ferry loaded with coal. They buried us in the pile of coal below deck. The journey took several days and for the best part of it, we were told by the captain not to move as we might have been heard. We were not the only people smuggled on that ship, there were several other people hidden there as well. So we would sit there motionless on the coal for all night long, waiting to reach the shores of Sweden, where we were finally given the sign that the air was clear.”

  • “We worked very hard. We didn’t get any money. They told us we were young and needed to pay for the Pflegekinder. How do you say Pflegekinder in Czech?” [What?] “Pflegekinder.” [Yeah, like refugees or something like that.] “Yeah. So all of us worked in agriculture and in the household. And these people had but one goal – to turn us into good Christians.”

  • “We would go to the Sokol to have physical exercises. When the Germans came to Czechoslovakia, they asked us in the Sokol, whether we were Czechs or Jews. But it turned out that my father had registered as a Jew and thus we were kicked out from the Sokol.”

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    Nahariya, Izrael, 04.04.2014

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    duration: 01:01:20
    media recorded in project Stories of 20th Century
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We knew that our parents hadn’t survived and that we didn’t have any home there, yet

Věra Wiener, roz. Ledererová
Věra Wiener, roz. Ledererová
photo: Současná: 4.4.2014, autor Hynek Moravec

Věra Wiener, née Ledererová, was born in 1923 into a Jewish family in Volyně in the south of Bohemia. Her father had a store selling animal furs and her mother taking care of the household. Věra at first attended elementary school and in 1934 left to Strakonice to continue her studies at a grammar school. However, in 1939 she had to suspend her studies and leave the school on racial grounds. Since her childhood, she was a member of the Zionist organization Techelet Lavan and in 1939 she was accepted to the Aliyah School in Prague. At this school, students were being prepared for leaving to Palestine – they studied Hebrew and Jewish history. Thanks to the Aliyah School, Věra was able to leave Bohemia in September 1939 and travel to Denmark, where she settled for a time and worked in agriculture. With the threat of a deportation of the Dutch Jews looming, Věra left Denmark in 1943 together with her future husband and they went to Sweden. She spent the rest of the war in Sweden working in agriculture. By the end of the war, both of her parents and her younger sister had perished in Auschwitz. Thus she never went back to her native Czechoslovakia. She stayed in Sweden till 1955 and then left to Haifa in Israel. In the beginning, she worked in a Kibbutz. Presently, Věra lives in a home for the elderly in Nahariya in Israel.