Mgr. Jana Teššerová

"Mom kept talking about her fear. She was experiencing tremendous fear. Even though she was the one who was the youngest in the family who didn't have children. But she had a profound fear. She talked about it, I guess, every day. My dad wasn't as outgoing, but by the fact that my mom survived the Holocaust, it left a awful mark on her. The trauma, the depression. And because she couldn't control herself, she talked about it all the time. I don't remember a day that the subject didn't come up in our house. I guess Mom forgot that we were the kids and that we were also hearing it every time. And we didn't realize that it didn't work that way in other families. As a child, I thought that what my mother was saying was what every aunt in Kezmarok was saying. But when I grew older, when I realized that it was only us, not the neighbors, who talked like that, we somehow found it harder to bear. Well, I did, I certainly did. Anyway, I had strange states of fear of war. When there was a siren, for example. I would hide because I would shout, 'There's going to be a war'. Dad: ' No, there's not going to be a war. This is the harvest. It's burning somewhere.' But you don't tell a kid for nothing, because that kid grows up in trauma."

"But we were not actively involved. Not at all. We knew it was some political thing. We knew there was someone who wanted to change the world. We knew someone was trying to change the world, but we were positive on their behalf. Were we cowardly? I don't know, maybe we were cowards also. But we had children. The parents were unhealthy, they were depressed, for their sake we would never have done that to harm them. They were pretty depressed anyway. They had severe trauma also. So we tried to keep everything so normal that we didn't make a problem for them because they were the ones affected. That I have trauma from my parents, because you know today, if you know the doctor, the professor of neurology, Ivan Rektor from Brno. He's doing research that trauma is inherited in the genes and I've met him, he's claiming that he's got it documented. You need to talk to him, he knows better. So, we've all had trauma, our trauma. It manifested itself in fear inherited from our parents, and then in the form of fear for the children. We lived so differently, you know, sort of... we're scared for the children, we're scared for the parents. We were always afraid of something. Because there was always somebody above us that was stressing us out. And we, of course, passed that on to this next generation. We lived comfortably, but we didn't engage in anything."