When I came back from Terezín, I didn‘t know how to play with dolls
Stáhnout obrázek
Lucie Ledererová was born on 16 July 1941 in Prague into the Jewish family of Bedřich Helmann and Anna Helmannová. She was not yet two years old when she and her relatives were deported to Terezín. Until the end of the war, she remained with both parents in the relative safety of the ghetto, although she does not remember much of her stay there. Just before Terezín was quarantined in May 1945 because of a typhus epidemic, the family managed to leave. An uncle sent a car for them in the last days of the war. After the war, Lucie went to school in Prague and also attended religious classes. After the communist takeover in February 1948, these were moved to the Maisel Synagogue, where lectures and various celebrations took place. The people who met there at that time gradually developed into the now large group called the Children of Maiselova. It was also there that Lucie met her future husband, Tomáš Lederer, who, like her, spent part of his childhood in Terezín. They were married in January 1960, and in the 1960s they had two children. After the occupation by Warsaw Pact troops in August 1968, the Lederers decided to leave their homeland. On 11 September, the family flew to Vienna together with Tomas‘ mother Anni Frei-Ledererová. The first months in the new city were very difficult, but they managed to find a place to live and very soon a job, and life slowly began to return to normal. Until the Velvet Revolution in autumn 1989, Lucie visited Czechoslovakia only twice. At the time of recording in 2024, she was living half in Vienna and half in Prague and never lost her spirit or sense of humour.
