Zeev Ron

* 1924

  • “On 9 January 1948 we were attacked in Kfar Sod, which is by the Syrian border, by some four hundred Arabs from the Syrian village that lay above us up the hills. On one single day, 9 January 1948, at seven in the morning, when everyone was already at work or in the chadar ochel, the dining hall; back then one of our people was shot, but we survived it somehow. From then on there was a group of ten youngsters, I was twenty-four at the time, every morning we got up at five and we climbed up the mountain, and we combed through it all the way to the top and phoned back down again that everyone can get up, that everything is okay.”

  • “That’s how we lived. My brother was three and a half years older than me, then me, and mum with her husband. Her husband, Professor Lamm, was a professor of languages; he already had two children in Palestine. Mum planned – and he too – that we would all get to Palestine one by one. I was the first they sent.”

  • “Mum and her husband wanted to get here too, but they couldn’t. They were already trapped. It’s a terrible thing. She had planned everything, sent me and my brother, and she herself was trapped. She died in the concentration camps. [Q: How did you find out if you were here?] I didn’t know about it. You couldn’t get any information during the war; I found out about her death after the war. [Q: And Professor Lamm?] As well. [And your grandmother?] Grandma lived for quite a while yet, she came to Terezín, and she lived in Terezín for several years.”

  • “Why should I go back? I’m an Israeli, I’m not an emigrant. This here is my country, not Czechia. I like Czechia a lot, Czech football, but to go back, certainly not.”

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    Ramat Gan, 28.10.2016

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I’m an Israeli, not an emigrant

Zeev Ron. 1949.
Zeev Ron. 1949.
zdroj: archiv pamětníka

Zeev Ron was born in 1924 in Vienna as Wolfgang Reinhold, into a Jewish family with an older brother. He grew up in Brno, where his mother Gina Reinhold moved after divorcing his father; his mother then married a second time, to Josef Lamm. Her mother and stepfather were Zionists, and they were both in Maccabi Hatzair. Wolfgang attended a Jewish grammar school in Brno for four years. In September 1938 he departed to Palestine, which the whole family attempted to reach, though only the sons succeeded - Wolfgang was followed soon afterwords by his older brother Kurt. Wolfgang Reinhold changed his name to Zeev Ron; he studied at the Mishmar Ha‘Emek boarding school for a year before joining the kibbutz of Givat Haim. Later, he also lived in the kibbutzes of Ein Gev and Kfar Sod. In autumn 1941 his mother and his stepfather were deported to the ghetto in Łódź; they both died in the war. In 1950 Zeev Ron married Dagmar Pollaková, who was also from Czechoslovakia. Together, they left the kibbutz and settled down near Kiryat Tivon. Dagmar was employed as a teacher, Zeev worked in agriculture and as a joiner; he later headed an insurance company. The couple brought up three children; Dagmar died in 2014. Zeev Ron lives in Ramat Gan.