I opened my mouth to answer, but I stopped. I knew the answer – as a matter of fact, I’ve known the answer for nearly 65 years. I asked myself, however, am I the person to reveal to the questioner a decades-long secret, a secret that was well-known in our big family but had, apparently, been kept from him all these years?
This man turned to me with this question because I am the last living first cousin in our family, a family that at one time, had no less than 34 first cousins – sons and daughters of the 13 Ticho siblings. My grandfather Itzchak Zvi Ticho was a true believing Jew living in Boskovice, a small town in the Czech Republic. He was the head of a family that I traced back to the late 1600’s and that, very likely, resided in Boskovice for centuries before.
All those hundreds of years, the many Ticho family members lived within a small circle in what is today the Czech Republic – until 1939, that is, when the German Army marched into Czechoslovakia. Six years later, after World War II and after the brutal and heartless Holocaust ended, the remaining family members were scattered in Australia, India, Argentina, Uruguay, England, in several locations in the United States and spread all over the area that later became Israel.
I was 91 years old when I was confronted by this question. The answer was on the tip of my tongue but I still hesitated. Do I have the right to answer the question truthfully? As far as I knew, everybody in our big family at one time or another became familiar with the story but for all these years apparently maintained the family secret. Should I be the one to violate their trust?
Fifteen members of our immediate family died in the Holocaust: five of my father’s siblings and their spouses and five first cousins. An additional five family members were trapped by the Nazis in 1939 when Czechoslovakia became a victim of German aggression. Four of us managed to escape: one cousin, my father, my brother and I. The fifth cousin, Lily, miraculously survived three years in the Terezin concentration camp, a stop at the Auschwitz genocide factory and bitter years in a Nazi slave labor camp.
Lily’s trials during the Holocaust began first when she was scheduled to be deported to Terezin. Despite their young age, she and her boyfriend, Herbert, decided to get married in the hope that this would keep them together. Terezin served the Nazis as the first in a long list of other ghettos, jails and concentration camps designated specifically for Jews. Upon arrival at this unique fortified city, men and women were separated and lived in different buildings. For three years, Lily and Herbert saw each other only for brief moments and hardly ever privately.
Lily had studied nursing for two years and her skills were in great demand in Terezin. Among the tens of thousands of women who arrived at the camp, there were always a few who were pregnant. Many women asked to have an abortion because they did not wish to be burdened by a baby,s or they did not wish to bring a child into the miserable living condition of the camp. Others wanted to have the baby in the hope that they will be given special consideration to care for the child. Lily, with the assistance of a physician, granted the mothers’ wishes, one way or the other, as best as she could.
THAT WAS Lily’s job for nearly three years. Her husband, Herbert, also had a very fortunate job in the camp bakery. He regularly risked his life to smuggle pieces of bread to Lily or to other family members who were in the camp. During these years, at regular intervals, transports “to the East” were organized and thousands of camp inmates disappeared. Constant new arrivals kept the camp overcrowded. Ultimately, it became Lily’s and Herbert’s time to leave Terezinin on a transport. However, they were assigned to different transports and completely lost touch with each other.
Lily was just 21-years-old and well built. She must have looked strong and healthy and, in the usual selection process in Auschwitz, she was sent to the right. A few days later, she and a group of Jewish women were sent to a slave labor camp in Poland. This was a miserable camp with sadistic female guards making the life of the prisoners as difficult as possible. The smallest infraction was punished by lengthy line-ups in front of the barracks. This was in the miserable winter between 1944 and 1945 and the prisoners had to stand at attention for hours, dressed in the only clothing they had: a coat, a dress and shoes. Prisoners who collapsed were beaten and many would die.
One day a German man came to such a line-up and asked whether there was anyone who spoke German and knew anything about electricity. Lily volunteered, in spite of the fact that she had no education in this subject, but she did speak German fluently. The man picked her out of the line-up and made her his assistant. Her job was, essentially, to carry the man’s ladder and toolbox as he went around the camp making repairs. Lily and this man had a cold and distant relationship, with the man speaking to Lily only to give her an order. If she did not respond fast enough or to his satisfaction, he was quick to remind her that he could send her back at any time.
On one occasion the man ordered Lily to climb up a ladder to do something up high.
“I am sorry,” she responded, “I cannot do that.” The man was shocked and angry and demanded to know why. “I am very sorry, sir,” Lily replied, “but I don’t have any underwear.” This brief sign of pride and modesty apparently made an impression on the man because the next day he brought her a pair of long underwear.
The relationship between the man and Lily now changed, and whenever the prisoners were ordered to stand at attention out in the freezing cold, he made sure that Lily was needed to provide him with some essential services and could not be spared. Instead of standing in the bitter cold, she was working in the heated electrician’s workshop. As a result, Lily survived and, in her videotaped testimony, she credited this German man for her survival when the Russian Army liberated the camp.
Lily returned to Brno, her hometown, and slowly recovered from her horrible four years. She zealously and intensely searched for her husband but encountered only death and dead ends. Millions and millions of people were displaced in Europe. Families were torn apart. Millions died. It took years for a modicum of normalcy to return. During this time Lily happened to meet the doctor she worked with in Terezin. He also survived but lost his wife in the gas chambers of Auschwitz.
FIVE YEARS went by. By then, Lily had accepted the fact that her Herbert was one of the six million Jews who did not survive the Holocaust. Slowly she began to rebuild her life and her nursing skills. And then, one day, as she was walking on one of the main streets of Brno, she ran into Herbert, her husband! He had miraculously survived and had spent years wandering while searching for his beloved Lily.
The reunion was difficult. They really did not have a “married” life during the three years in Terezin and then they had been apart for years after the war ended. In addition, Lily was raising a son. Nevertheless they seized the opportunity to emigrate to Israel where Lily could rejoin her sister and the few other members of the Ticho family who escaped the Holocaust.
To gather material for my book, MiDor LeDor – from Generation to Generation, I tape-recorded detailed interviews with several family members and friends who were familiar with our family’s history. It was during these interviews that I became aware of the fact that Lily’s “secret” was known throughout the family. However, in Lily’s videotaped testimony that is on file at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, she simply states that she met her husband and they had a son.
Dr. Ryshavy died on December 29, 1955, and in his testimonies there is no mention of Lily or of her son – until it came to his last will and testament. In it he declared the heir of his house to be a minor born April 2, 1948, and should he not be able to file a claim, the inheritance should go to his mother, Lily Sobotkova, nee Ticho. On September 10, 1958, the People’s Court in Ostrava, Czech Republic, declared the minor child, represented by his mother, the owner of the house.
The minor child was just seven years old when all of this was taking place and, apparently, his mother was determined to keep the information from him. It was not until he, many years later, by some round-about manner, received word that he once inherited a house in the Czech Republic. That was why he decided to turn to his old cousin with the question, “Who is Dr. Ryshavy and why would he make me the heir of his house in the Czech Republic?”
The question caused a bitter rage to rise in me. All the hatred, all the loathing, all the revulsion I felt for the Nazis and that I had, at last, learned to control, came back with a vengeance. Here, once again, even after the Nazis were destroyed, the bloody hands of the heartless mass-murderers were reaching across seven decades causing such intense pain and distress to me and this poor innocent man sitting before me.My heart was also aching from the rage as I recalled the pain of a father who gave up his son, the ache of the son who never knew his father, the sting of the husband who was forced to live with a secret indiscretion, the torture of a mother who had to live with a lie, and the stress and anxiety of a family to maintain a decades-long lie, the truth behind the question. I resented that I was now forced to make a choice to tell the truth or continue the lie the Nazis foisted on all of us.
With my eyes filling with tears and with my voice abandoning me, I decided for the truth and with great difficulty managed to say, “Because he was your father.”