Vacation idyll
A sunny letter to father
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"We're having a great time. The sun has been shining for two days now, so we were able to go swimming, but the radio is forecasting rain again tomorrow."
Nespeky/Prague
Hitler’s plans for Czechoslovakia could not have been clearer: on May 30th, 1938, he declared to the Wehrmacht (German army) that it was his “immutable resolve” to shatter the country “in the foreseeable future.” Already months before, he had incited the leader of the Sudeten German Party, which was partly bankrolled by Nazi Germany, to conjure up a confrontation by making unreasonable demands on behalf of the German minority in the country. Under the influence of events in Germany, anti-Semitism had increased. But, so far, it had only led to boycotts and physical violence in the border areas of Northern and Western Bohemia, which were predominantly inhabited by Germans. While this crisis was brewing in the background, the psychiatrist and writer Josef Weiner, his wife, Hanka, and their two young daughters were on vacation in the central Bohemian town of Nespeky. Hanka’s letter (in Czech) to her father, the renowned Prague lawyer Oskar Taussig, smacks of a perfectly idyllic holiday atmosphere and spares its reconvalescent recipient anything unpleasant.
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Institution:
Leo Baeck Institute – New York | Berlin
Collection:
Winn Family Collection, AR 25493
Original:
Box 1, folder 5
on the days before
Curated by Leo Baeck Institute – New York | Berlin © 2018 Leo Baeck Institute
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