MUDr. Jiří Koref

zdroj: Private archive Roman Koref
Stáhnout obrázek

MUDr. Jiří Koref was born as an only child on April 14, 1932 in Německý Brod to the house of his grandfather Alois Koref. His father, Oskar, was a general practitioner, and his mother, Marie, took care of the household. In Německý Brod, the witness entered Rubeš‘s school, but after the German occupation of the republic and issued decrees, he was forced to leave the school due to his Jewish origin. The Koref family moved to Prague, Vinohrady, in 1940, and Jiří began attending a Jewish school in the Old Town. From 1942, his relatives and acquaintances were gradually transported first to the Terezín concentration camp (ghetto) and later most often to Auschwitz, where they died. Jiří Koref and his mother and father were transported to Terezín in July 1943 and met several other Jewish families from Německý Brod. The Koref family survived World War II there and in May 1945 returned to Prague, where the witness finished the burgher school and began studying at the secondary grammar school. After two years, his father got a primary job at the urology department at Havlíčkův Brod Hospital and they moved back to Brod. Jiří Koref entered the third year of the Havlíčkův Brod secondary grammar school, where he graduated and then studied at the Faculty of Medicine in Hradec Králové for six years. After graduating, he joined the oncology department in Trutnov in 1957, from where he returned a year later and began working at the Havlíčkův Brod hospital in the dermatology department, where he remained until his retirement (1992). As the last living witness to the Holocaust from Havlíčkův Brod, in 2017 he took part in a public reading of the names of the victims of the Holocaust, Yom HaShoah, where twenty-three names of his relatives were mentioned. He lived in Havlíčkův Brod at the time of filming. Jiří Koref died on September 12, 2021.