The day after the colloquium, the organiser Mojmír Jeřábek and Táňa Klementová have organised a trip to Boskovice to visit Hermann Ungar’s birthplace and tour the old Jewish ghetto. We are accompanied by a group of elderly members of the German Club from Brno.  A number of the older generation still have German as a first language (as did  my family and most assimilated Jews) – a legacy of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Contemporary gateway to teh ghetto

Old photos of the Boskovice ghetto

Old photos of the Boskovice ghetto

Old photos of the Boskovice ghetto

It’s another fine but crisp autumn day, trees turning golden, and fields recently harvested although some barley for beer-making is yet to be cut (this area is renowned for its dark beers) as we drive through brightly coloured villages to reach Boskovice. Here we are met by the local historian who leads us to the Town Hall.

The lady Mayor and her deputy await us, with coffee and a formal welcome. She is an architect who studied in Prague and has returned, determined to make Boskovice greener and easier to live in. The old ghetto had become quite desirable and there are too many cars and not enough recreational spaces and facilities for the younger population. There is a real dynamism in the air.

Cobbled streets, renovated houses, brightly painted

Cobbled streets, renovated houses, brightly painted

Cobbled streets, renovated houses, brightly painted

An old factory, currently being renovated

We have an exchange of gifts – she gets my book and I receive a goody bag including two books on Boskovice. There are several formal speeches and I have to give a resume of the book, which Táňa translates.

Then we’re off, ably led by a former colleague of the late Ungar and Boskovice expert, Jaroslav Bránský. As well as visiting the old Knöpfelmacher house, where Tom’s Uncle Felix lived with his kids, and where Dad used to spend summer holidays, we are thrilled to gain access to the yard and communal staircase of the Kaiser Haus, which is a first. Nothing much to see, as it has been turned into flats, but nevertheless it is a goosebump moment.

Kitchen insde the Knopfelmacher house

The garden where my Dad played with his cousins

Knopfelmacher house now a second-hand bookshop

Inside the Kaiser Haus garden

The group in the garden

Tana and I outside the Kaiser Haus

The German group inside the old bar, now a creche

The secret staircase

The other side is now a jewellery shop

Inside the Kaiser Haus, communal landing

But there is something else exciting – the new stolpersteine that have appeared outside the house. Memory stones for those who were murdered.

Another first is seeing the mikvah, or ritual bath, near the synagogue. It is still in working order, fed by a spring. But it is disappointing that in the Hermann Ungar café and bookshop there are no copies of Ungar’s books – only Prince Harry in Czech! But later this makes sense…as you will see!

Ross by the sping in the mikvah

Outside the Hermann Ungar bookshop! no books…

…apart from this!

We are also lucky to gain access to the little Jewish museum – a reinstatement of the rabbi’s house in one of the old grand houses of the village, where he had rooms. 

The kitchen

The house now restored and how it was

The dining room

And here are a few photos of the beautiful synagogue and evidence of the Ungar distillery legacy! And of the deportations…

The records of the family deportations

Mojmir (in the hat) outside the synagogue

The beautifully painted roof, which was discovered under whitewash and restored

The synagogue

The slivovitz jar

After a four-course lunch – game pate, the ubiquitous clear soup with noodles and leberwurst, hunks of venison in a thick sauce with mounds of oniony potatoes, and to finish, strudel with  cream and ice cream (gosh they don’t half eat, those Czechs!) – and more speeches, we trundle up to the Castle.

Ross with Tana outside the chateau

The venison and potato

Ross with the soup

We have never been inside and although the furniture is mostly replaced since the war (there is some lovely Japanese lacquer and this intricate and rare sewing case inset with porcelain), when it was occupied by the Nazis, you get a really good feel for what it must have been like. There are still lots of family portraits and ephemera, and in the communist era the family was allowed to return and inhabit three rooms. More recently the estate was largely restituted to the family descendants.

The main courtyard

The sewing box

The intricate porcelain panels in the sewing box

The intricate porcelain panels in the sewing box

The Mensdorff-Pouillys were, as the name suggests, originally from France, refugees of the revolution. They intermarried with local nobility (as in Austro-Hungarian) but it was nevertheless a shock to see portraits of Prince Albert and Queen Victoria, beloved aunt and uncle (Wikipedia: through Princess Sophie of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, wife of Emmanuel von Mensdorff-Pouilly [m. 1804], the family is closely related to the royal families of Belgium, Sweden, Portugal, Bulgaria and the United Kingdom.) The most quirky thing is the secret staircase from the library to the chapel!

The secret staircase

The view of the chapel

Tana appearing from the secret passage!

Queen Victoria!

We have a train to Vienna to catch, so we climb back into the coach for the ride back. It really has been an honour to be welcomed and hosted by the Mayor. It feels like, finally, Hermann Ungar is getting the recognition he deserves.

Author: vickyunwin

I am a writer and traveller. Our darling daughter Louise died on 2 March 2011, aged 21 (www.louisecattell.com) and I started writing as therapy. We never know how long we have on this earth, so I live for every day...in November 2013 I was diagnosed and operated on for a malignant soft tissue sarcoma in the calf, followed by 6.5 weeks of radiotherapy, so am embarking on a different kind of journey which you can follow here. I also have another site www.healthylivingwithcancer.co with my blueprint for health and well-being.