One Hundred Miracles: Music, Auschwitz, Survival and Love by Zuzana Ruzickova & Wendy Holden

Author:Zuzana Ruzickova & Wendy Holden [Ruzickova, Zuzana & Holden, Wendy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Autobiography, Biography, Non-Fiction, Historical, Holocaust, World War II
ISBN: 9781408896846
Google: Ou7cDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2020-05-13T23:00:00+00:00

9

Paris, 196 5

When I was forced to leave Paris in 1956 after Munich so that Viktor could have his moment in the spotlight, I wept bitterly. On several occasions thereafter, I would wake with tears in my eyes after dreaming of that gilded city and say to Viktor, ‘I would so like to go back to Paris one day.’

That didn’t seem likely, although we did consider the possibility of emigrating around that time because Viktor’s mother had died and his father was happily settled with relatives in the country. It would have been difficult getting my husband and my mother out of Czechoslovakia while I was abroad but not completely impossible at that time. I could maybe have given one of my Eastern bloc recitals and slipped into the West by train instead of coming home. At the same time Viktor could have gone to the country with Mummy where friends could have helped them cross the border. The possibility of living and working in London or Paris was very tempting and Viktor too had received offers to stay when he was in France.

Immediately after the war we had also considered moving to America. A doctor friend in Dobř íš, who was close to President Beneš , warned us, ‘Get out. The communists will come and they won’t let go until they have made muzhiks (Russian peasants) out of all of us.’ He was right .

Mummy wrote to her sister Elsa in New York to see if we could join them there and she immediately replied yes and suggested that I complete my studies at Juilliard , which was kind of her, but I wasn’t in any fit state at that time to pass the exams for such a notable arts school. They sent the application papers for Juilliard anyway, along with US government questionnaires – so many forms. I started to fill them all in but stopped when I came across the column which asked me my ‘race’. I was so revolted and angry that I immediately tore up the forms. Living behind the Iron Curtain, I didn’t understand the serious racism problems in the United States or how it would lead to the formation of the civil rights movement. All I could think of was the Nazis and their obsession with ‘racial purity’.

‘I will never live in a country where I will be asked about my race!’ I declared to my mother.

‘Well, if you really feel that way,’ she said, a little uncertainly, but she already had misgivings and was worried how her sister and brother-in-law could provide for us too when they were not yet prosperous and were struggling themselves as immigrants. She feared we would have always been considered the poor relations, a burden on their resources, and we both knew that I would have to earn a wage and couldn’t have afforded the fees for Juilliard anyway.

It was my concerns for my mother that stopped Viktor and I fleeing in the 1950s. She was approaching

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