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Gestapo Insists on Divorce of a Mixed Marriage

Helene Hirsch, born Meyer.

Born: 7 November 1905 in Teplice. She remained an only child.

Father: Ship’s captain on a trade ship. Of German nationality, living in Hamburg. He died in 1908. He and Helene’s mother were divorced shortly before his death.

Mother: Ella Meyer, born Kerl, married in 1904. Married for a second time in 1922 to a banker named Perutz in Teplice.

Helene’s mother continued to run the boarding house founded by the grandmother, Mrs Marie Kerl, after her death. Helene spent her childhood and youth here until her marriage.

Helene's mother died from suicide on 6 June 1945 in Teplice.

Native country: Through her father’s nationality: Germany.

Religion: Evangelical. Her mother was Catholic.

Due to her mother’s contact with Jewish people, as a child Helene mainly had Jewish friends throughout her school years. The other Christian schoolgirls resented her for this, which later led to a strong sense of isolation, especially in the dance classes. One lifelong friendship with a Jewish girl began in the pram.

It was not unusual in Teplice for Jews and Christians to meet, since the well-off Jewish population held a fairly dominant position. Furthermore, many Jewish boarders were living in Helene's grandmother’s house (later her mother’s), so friendly relations began quite naturally.chr

As a young woman, through her interest in sport Helene mostly socialised with Christian groups. She was well-known as a tennis player. A close friendship with a man built up on this basis. With time however, this changed and at the age of 25 Helene married a Jewish man who was born in Teplice. When the engagement was announced, Helene was annoyed by the Christian and the Jewish families alike in that the Christians found it wrong that she should marry a Jew, and the Jews found this Jew socially beneath her. The marriage was however especially good – until Hitler and the circumstances created by him interfered.

The husband, Egon Hirsch, was a top insurance agent at the Viktoria company. He got a job in Bodenbach, where the young couple relocated (1930). There they only had contact with Jewish people, the Jews and the Christians did not socialise. They did have one non-Jewish acquaintance, a colleague of Egon’s who often came to their house. He was resented for this by the Christian side.

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In 1933 Egon was moved to Karlsbad, which was an improvement in every way. They felt so happy there that Egon did not want to leave the place when in 1938 Hitler annexed the Sudentenland and almost all Jews fled to (at that time still safe) Prague. But Helene finally managed to persuade him, so they both went to Prague leaving everything behind in Karlsbad. The atmosphere there in the Jewish community was extremely depressing and Egon and Helene felt altogether so unhappy that they returned to Karlsbad. But not for long! After a week the situation in the Sudentenland got so much worse that they again fled to Prague, this time for good. In 1939 however, Hitler also occupied Prague. Helene assessed the situation more accurately than her husband and she pulled out all the stops to make it possible for them both to emigrate. In her spirited manner she went directly with Egon’s passport to the Gestapo and in order to get him a permit to leave the country, she came up with the excuse that he wanted to visit his sick mother-in-law. She also managed to get him a ticket, and so he was able to make the journey to England. Helene herself was not granted permission to leave, since as a Christian she was not allowed to leave the country. Her passport was even taken away and she only got it back two months later. She kept trying, but when she finally was allowed to leave the country, she did not get the visa for England, so had to stay in Prague. Until he left in March 1939, Egon was able to continue working for his insurance company Viktoria in Prague. The marriage was dissolved upon the orders of the Gestapo once Egon’s passport had arrived from England.

Until 1946 when Helene was finally able to join her husband living in London, her life went by as follows: Since in Czechoslovakia there was labour conscription, she looked for work although she did not have the financial need to.

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She joined a Czech lawyer who needed to take on someone who could speak German, where she worked in office service. After she had been working there about a year, she gave up the job and, as she was used to doing, went for a few weeks to do winter sports in the mountains. This surprising fact was brought about by a doctor’s certificate stating that she had TB. The reasoning given was that the X-ray image showed a healed over shadow and the longstanding slightly raised temperatures were indicative of TB. The lung disease of an aunt who had died early was also put to use for this purpose. In fact Helene Hirsch never had any such disease, but the employment office never made any difficulties for her, neither this first time, nor over any of the other various later medical certificates. Also, at a time when she was supposed to go to the ammunitions factory, she was exempted. She worked in various roles, either where the employment of a German was required, or else, as in the case of Viktoria, where in view of Egon’s work there, they wanted to help her. On one occasion she found employment through a Christian manager who had declared his Jewish wife as a half Jew, felt insecure and wanted to hire anyone who he knew to have an anti-Nazi stance. Helene used these various jobs, where opportunities always arose, to sabotage the work of the Germans. She also sheltered a Jewish acquaintance in her place of living for a while. He had come to Prague after his Christian wife had driven him out of Vienna. He was eventually discovered and sent to Theresienstadt concentration camp where he took his own life by touching electrically charged barbed wire.

A month and a half before the end of the war Helene was able to go to Teplice to see her mother with a certificate from the employment office, again acknowledging her

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tuberculosis. She had to attend a doctor in Teplice, who gave her very painful injections against the supposed disease, but she wanted to stay in Teplice so she had to put herself through that.

Two months after the peace agreement, when the Russians occupied Teplice, the two women (the mother was still alive) took French prisoners of war under their protection in their house. Apart from the fear of the Russians, they were also troubled by the possibility of deportation, and this drove the mother to suicide.

Helene was one of the first to be able to go to England. She profusely thanked an English lady, a Christian, who had readily accepted Egon, for her tireless efforts. Since Egon had always declared himself to the authorities in England as married, it was soon possible to get the marriage, which had only been dissolved under the Nazi regime, legally valid again. As it turned out however, due to the fact that their experiences over the seven years of their separation had estranged them so much from one another, after three years together, Helene and Egon again divorced. Afterwards, like almost all refugees, Helene tried a wide variety of types of work. In 1947 she eventually got a job as a secretary for the European Service of the BBC, where she still works today.

Helene's possessions and the large house in Teplice were lost through the circumstances without any prospect of proportionate refunding.

Helen Hirsch

3. Juli 1958