Reflections of a Holocaust survivor

Note from the Editor

This piece was written by Lydia Tischler at the invitation of the editors to reflect on her experience of the Holocaust and how that influenced her subsequent choice to train as a child psychotherapist.

I still vividly recall the occasion when I decided to work with children. There must have been a mixture of motives for this resolution. Although already an adolescent when I lost my mother during the war, the most important motive, as I discovered much later, was my search for a mother. When I found myself in the world without a mother, then looking after children became a vicarious means by which to mother myself.

I was one of the older girls, 16 at the time, who spent some eight weeks in a rehabilitation home helping to look after a group of small orphans who had spent their young lives in Terezin (Theresienstadt) concentration camp.

I too came to this home from Terezin. The whole enterprise was undertaken by a very resourceful member of the Czech Brethren, a religious group much like the Plymouth Brethren. Přemysl Pitter commandeered a lorry and brought the children out of Terezin following the camp’s liberation by the Russian Army. Our new home was a requisitioned villa abandoned by its German occupants in the village of Olešovice. Arrival at Olešovice marked the end of one journey and the beginning of another, my post-war life.

An uneventful childhood, spent in Moravska Ostrava, was overshadowed by Hitler’s rantings in next door Germany, raising anxieties in the Jewish population, and no doubt my parents would have conveyed this to me. My childhood was finally shattered when Hitler marched into Czechoslovakia, ‘a far away country’1 unknown to Mr. Chamberlain, on March 15th, 1939 when I was 10 years old. Ostrava had a very large German population and I still recall the German women’s delighted frenzy at the sight of the German soldiers. I remember being caught up in the excitement, something important was happening around me, and for reasons I no