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ladies and gentlemen, welcome. my name is mojmã­r jeå™ã¡bek and i’m part of the meeting brno team a festival that is currently underway which includes this historical meeting of three families three families which co-formed history of brno as well as moravia and especially its industrialization as well of culture. three houses, three families attached to three houses symbolically for us in brno, three houses we are rightfully proud of. there are three names and i’ll name them according to the sizes of those families.

the lã¶w-beer family which appears to be the largest and widespread in many branches around the world, the tugendhat family which at some moments encounters the lã¶w-beer family. and the å å¥astnã½ family. let’s start with this family because none of their members is here on stage with us. this family lives in california, a relatively small family and the meeting of the families that is currently taking place in brno, and which is attended by 120 members of these families, is attended by only three adult members of å å¥astnã½ family. they are young people and none of them wanted to participate in such debate.

and we respect that. let me start by introducing people here on stage with me. i will start here on my left hand side. this is mrs ruth guggenheim-tugendhat from zurich in switzerland. next to her there is mrs daniela hammer-tugendhat from vienna in austria. both are daughters of greta tugendhat, or we can say markã©ta, as she was called by that name, and her husband fritz, or bedå™ich tugendhat who left behind the spectacular artwork of priceless value.

let’s turn to the other side. here on my right hand side, left hand side from your perspective, there is mrs anna å abatovã¡, the well-known public defender of rights, i can say she is from prague as well as from brno because she lives in prague, but she was born and she works in brno. on her right hand side, from my view, there is mr daniel lã¶w-beer. as fate would have it he lives in great britain now and his name is low-beer if i’m pronouncing it correctly. so that’s all to the introduction of those who will speak to us today. before we start the debate, members of these two foreign families expressed a wish to give a short statement. so first it is mrs ruth guggenheim-tugendhat to give her statement.

followed by a statement of mrs daniela hammer-tugendhat and finally mr daniel low-beer’s statement. so mrs ruth, please. i would like to thank the city once again for this invitation. we’ve had a couple of amazing days here and the atmosphere this time was very different from my other visits to the city of brno. from my point of view there is a much more open mood. in particular, i was very pleased with the mayor’s speech, when the mayor said

that he understood ,there were conflicting emotions, different moods and not just positive. this whole idea is very important to me. i am a psychoanalyst. and when i work with my patients i am trying hard to make sure that they deal with their past and that always causes conflicting ambivalent feelings. firstly i would like to say: that i am thinking about our parents just now. about fritz and greta tugendhat, what if they were here.

and then i had to ask: what would it be like for them? i cannot answer instead of them, i can only speak for myself. i think that on one hand they would be happy. they would be happy to see their city, the forests they used to go mushroom picking, they’d be happy that their house is in a good condition and above all that it is open to the public. on the other hand, or at least that is my feeling, they would also have other feelings. difficult feelings. because the house no longer belongs to our parents, it is no longer a family house,

and in that sense it has no longer any life. there is a lot of people here who were invited with us. they are people who we are connected to. there is no continuity any more, the history had been interrupted. it was because our ancestors were forced to leave this country, and those who did not leave were murdered. and the history was not interrupted only in our family, it happened to others, too. there has been a break in history and it has been the case for others, too. i would also like to say, that this situation is as ambivalent for us as it is often ambivalent for those people,

whom we met here. and i am able to understand that because on one hand, we were welcomed here with a bouquet of flowers and open arms but on the other hand we were told that we have nothing to say here. i understand that there was a disruption in the past, but i also want you to understand that it is not so easy for me either. and in this regard i am very curious to hear others, what they have to say but i am especially pleased

but i am especially looking forward to receive questions from the audience. the hall and the many people here may not enable that but i would like to get into conversation. before we hear mrs daniela hammer-tugendhat, i apologise but i have been corrected, that the channels are czech on four, german on six and english on eight. i’m sure you’ve found out by now. so now, mrs daniela and her statement, please. yes. good evening everybody. a huge amount of family members have met here, almost 120 family members from 5 continents are here,

some of whom we’ve never met before, nor have we even known about their existence and it is an incredible experience for us to be able to meet here where we all come from. all of us here, we are all descendants of refugees. and if it wasn’t for all those countries which accepted our ancestors, our parents and grandparents when they decided to leave, none of us would be here. had our ancestors been slaughtered, none of us would be born. given the current situation, this is very important to me. what we are currently experiencing is a massive movement of refugees

and there is a terrible increase in nationalism and racism here in our european countries and in many other countries that refuse to accept refugees. and in this context i believe it is absolutely necessary to deal with the past, because history in any event casts its shadow and is manifesting itself at present and the less we consciously accept this factthe more it becomes powerful. of course i do realize that history does never repeat itself, but we cannot deny that there are terrible structural similarities between the present and the past situation. the social crisis exists and people react in a similar way as they did at that time.

they are not trying to find the cause where it is, i.e. in politics, in economic and social situation, but they are seeking culprit, and culprit is mostly someone who have nothing to do with the crisis itself, and they are basically and always the others. and for me it is important to point out that it is absolutely irrelevant, whether these others are jews or germans or muslims or just asylum seekers or refugees. and as soon as we cease to see these people as human beings and they become the others to us, we dehumanized ourselves. and it ultimately leads to exclusion and to slaughtering and warfare.

and because my family and i have experienced this story it is important for me to realize that it is utterly necessary to deal with it and from my point of view the only consequence is that we simply need to fight against any form of xenophobia. thank you. thank you, everyone i share many of those emotions with the family. i’m daniel low-beer. my father is thomas low-beer, named after thomas masaryk.

he said he felt very czech. and i felt when you put three families and three houses together, what you found yesterday is the house for the first time felt like a home. there were children playing in the garden, there was life and movement in this wonderful glass room and the architecture itself was three or four times better than it is when it’s a house. so i think that’s certainly one of the emotions, even if for a day or two of coming home, of transforming something of a house when you put people in it and when there’s a family. but also beyond those i really want to thank as well i think from the low-beers that are here the recognition of this initiative from the brno authorities and also the work of daniela

the recognition of the name low-beer. when i came here 10 or 20 years ago it was difficult to explain to my children this link between the brno story and the low-beer story. even though it was a very close link. and you’ve given us these beginnings to give us something back of our stories and of our history and for me that’s a very important form of the word reconciliation. bringing those stories and those histories together. and working through the good bits and the bad bits. and i’ve actually been collecting some of these stories of the low-beers in this piece arks

and they really when i talk to them now the stories are disappearing and you have to put them together into a book. there’s two stories they tell me. the first one is of czechoslovakia in the 1930s. and they tell me the story of my father, thomas masaryk, of a country which could get the best out of the czechs, the germans, the austrians, the jews and put it into something that really was at the heart of europe was one of the most prosperous liberal country they really looked back to and it’s a story of brno which our family was a small part of and it was a story of brno. they saw its strength and what thomas masaryk and this country could get from those people in the 1930s. and it’s a story of europe which still has relevance. and one of the difficulties of my father going back in 1970s was he didn’t see that story.

he didn’t know how to connect to it any more. and i think that’s the beginning of that. the second story they then tell me is the story of escape. what happened in 1938. so this is why i call this arks because it’s a place where you put stories before they disappear in the jewish world. but it’s also that feeling of uprootingof putting your life into a small vessel and taking it to the seas of war and escaping. and the first story that my dad only found out in the 80s was our factories continued during the war. our particular factory which was of walter, felix and august and the members of each families here today. he’d lost touch with it and then in the 80s he heard this story that this factory had continued, and it was the only concentration camp which saved jews during the war.

it became schindler’s ark. and a 1098 jews were actually saved there and more jews than are surviving in countries. and he was very, that story of him reconnecting to his factories and it’s a very important story. and it’s a story that occurred here in czechoslovakia. and that’s in a little way those two connecting them. and then i guess the third one is when they left they were refugees. so there were two things they found difficult. one was certainly being expelled uprooting. but then every country in europe closed their frontiers. so my father had no passport, he had no visa. he was czech.

but he had no passport and no visa. and the only way he could escape was into england which refused many of the families, was on his sister as his sister’s son. she would have been around 8 to 9 when she would have given birth to my father. but there is no doubt that certainly the nazis’ expulsion of the jews but many of the jews had also died because we closed that frontiers in europe. one after the other after every in 1938. and those stories i think they occurred as history then but there’re also stories in the past, they are stories which come back in different forms and we deal with each of those three today which is there’s a very fine role particularly in brno in europe.

there’s also a story of a very narrow national identity which we’ve seen hasn’t worked. there’s a story of our factories and i hope you’re giving us back something of our stories we hopefully contributed a little bit to some of those difficult issues during the war. and there’s also when we became refugees. and we know some of the consequences and it creates the greatness of europe, of america, of the middle east and they’re difficult issues. the numbers are large, the far right then it’s very vocal, there’s an underlying antisemitism in the 1930s, as there is an anti-islamic feeling now. those issues are coming back. but we really want to first of all thank the authorities

because you’re giving us back here something of our story and of our name and of our history but hopefully it’s a story we can continue because some of these low-beer stories are really a very much part of what is brno and some of the issues that hopefully we’ll be discussing today. so thank you. mrs å abatovã¡, as regards your participation here in this panel, it was our mutual wish to have you here because we all felt the need for another voice, for another experience, not only directly from the families. and that’s why we chose you

so that you could tell us your own life experience, your experience of dissent, your experience from your current work. so i will go back to the past, maybe before the year 1989. what did you know about these three families, about these three houses and i mean including the å å¥astnã½ family, before the year 1989? what was your experience and knowledge? with some shame i have to admit if i’m being totally honest that most likely nothing before the year 1989. it is very hard to reconstruct in memory

when exactly did you find out about certain things. but i have tried a lot to remember my first particular memory of knowing about the villa tugendhat and i have identified a memory. it was in 1992 and i clearly remember that some negotiations, actually the very first negotiations after the 1992 elections, took place there and that later led to the separation of the czechoslovak federation. and i know for sure that at that time i have already known about the villa tugendhat. but i’m not sure if i knew about it earlier. and my memory about the other two villas is even worse.

i must have found out about the villa lã¶w-beer after the revolution but the villa å å¥astnã½ is different because when i was a child, for 6 years we lived on the corner of kalvodova and hroznovã¡ street and i used to walk to school around that villa. but for me it wasn’t the villa å å¥astnã½, it was a government villa. and my schoolmate’s dad was a superintendent there and one day my classmate took us there together with other girls, i was probably 8 or 9, she took us in and we were also in the garden and i remember there was a swimming pool which was not looked after and was covered with leaves.

and that’s actually my childhood memory. obviously i had no clue and i wasn’t even curious at that age that it could have been a family home before it became a government villa. maybe i could be forgiven for that because i left brno when i was 20 and i went to live in prague until i came back here to work in 2001 and with a little break of 7 years i have been working in brno since. i would like to say one thing. we always talk about brno and three cultures that met here. we talk about czechs, jews and germans. and of course, the jews were both german and czech.

in fact, i realized that my family was more concerned with the relationship between czechs and germans as it was part of our history but it was because of 5 siblings of my grandmother who was german and was forced to leave after the war. i knew that actually. but again for me there was no connection with brno but with south moravia where the family comes from. as for the relationship with jews who lived in czechoslovakia before the war i realize that i grew up in the 50s and 60s with clear-cut paradigm that the jews were the greatest civilian victims of the nazi era and of the world war ii. i think that wasn’t officially questioned at all.

i actually learned about it in school in some form. but for me it was an abstraction without any specific content. it was also related to the fact that our textbooks were really very general, very ideological and at that time they strongly ethnicized nazism to be identified with germans only. only later, a non-ethical view of that time is successfully brought to life and i think that this view has greatly damaged our thinking and did not allow us to sufficiently deal with victims of nazism who were german.

i think it was probably one of the reasons why those things were not spoken about very much at that time. i remember from my childhood, that the suffering of jews during the war was never questioned but as i said no specific stories were told. i didn’t know any particular life stories, for me it was just an abstraction. only later in the 80s, because i was able to read in german and french, i read books of elias canetti in german and elie wiesel in french and i started to be interested myself. i can’t remember the name of the italian author who committed suicide and who wrote about auschwitz (primo levi). in fact it was only in the 80s when i started to be interested myself

and actually it was this topic which for me started to have a specific content and wasn’t just an abstract idea any more. without trying to generalize i think that most of the brno citizens have a very similar experience as regards knowing or unfortunately rather not knowing about these three families for example. however, let me ask you because my impression is that the regime before 1989 was deliberately silent about this as it was not appropriate, of course, however you were also present in another environment, thanks to your father and that was the dissent, where also because of your father, of course a discussion on czech-german settlement,

on the issue of expulsion and its consequences began. even the incredible idea that the only way how to ensure further development in europe is by the unification of germany arose. but i have to admit i really don’t know – did this topic ever arise there? this suppression of this part of our history or our mutual history? to be honest i don’t think anything like that was mentioned in the official documents of the charter. but i think it was mentioned within the unofficial circles and as i said in the late 70s i started to search for these books and of course if you read a book you talk about it with your friends.

but in my opinion this topic was debated much more often within the environment of the charterthan within the whole society. but that’s how i remember it. i will now turn to the other side, to mrs daniela and mrs ruth. you may have already partially talked about it, maybe not very specifically. your relationship with brno must have been developing and it is still developing. so how is it today in 2017? your relationship to brno. yes, i can only echo what my sister said earlier that feelings are ambivalent. i am very grateful for this invitation,

for this incredibly generous invitation that our family received from the city of brno and once again i would like to thank the mayor and the deputy mayor for that but i also sincerely thank mr mojmã­r jeå™ã¡bek and his whole team, too. for me it is a very important thing that this invitation for my family takes place within the meeting brno festival because it is a sign that the city is willing to remember and positively respond to the german-speaking but still fellow citizens, jewish fellow citizens who contributed not only to the prosperity of this city but also to its culture. and of course i can see that it is the same everywhere, one cannot possibly say they are brno citizens just as one cannot say they are germans or jews.

there is a huge number of people in brno who we have a very positive relationship with and they feel very positive about us but this ambivalence is still there. and the main reason is that our family and i, along with my husband ivo hammer, we had been taking care of that house for decades. that’s how it was for me. maybe a brief explanation – my mother and i still lived here in 1970 when an international conference was held and i admired my mother who was just here and without any bitterness she did everything she could to help to restore the house again and make it available to the public. and then at the end of the year it was transferred and everything was over.

my mother and i we had a very close relationship and that was why i felt responsible for the house and i accepted the fact. and then for decades we had been working hard to make sure that the house was restored, well restored and made available to the public. and i have to admit that it was very difficult for us, and sometimes even painful, to understand why is not always our effort perceived correctly for what it is an effort arising from the sense of responsibility for this house but many people see it as unwanted intervention from outside. thank you. the same question for mrs ruth.

i’ll tell you about yesterday and about today. yesterday there was a lot of people in the house of my parents and my grandparents and we were very lucky to have a beautiful weather and everything was just amazing. children were so excited about the lawn outside and the water in the fountain that is at the front of our grandparents’ house that they got undressed and played in the fountain. later that evening we were brilliantly hosted outside and everyone was in a good mood and everything was just great. today we attended various discussions, we listened to a lecture and saw different places

and then, later in discussions questions began to pop up: yes and does your story explain the question of ownership? and the mood immediately dropped. but i do understand that because there is a new generation here now and we are another generation and it’s not easy to answer these questions. and there was another question which was not asked by my family but by the family å å¥astnã½ and i was glad that somebody asked that. they asked – why did we travel by bus today? and the man’s answer was that here is the the factory of the å å¥astnã½ family and told us to look out of the window.

and what did we see? a big pile of stones because the factory was recently demolished and a shopping mall is going to be built there instead. thank you. i will now turn to daniel low-beer with a similar question. but i have to ask a broader question. what is your relationship to svitã¡vka, to brnä›nec and to brno today? tomorrow we are all going there. and as you know, we are expecting a similar picture of ruins in brnä›nec. but still, what is your relationship today despite the ruins we are about to see tomorrow?

and both the mayor and the deputy mayor of svitã¡vky are here so you will be listened to very carefully. please. i’ll just talk about the three stages of coming back to brno. so the first time i came back to brno was in 1974 with my father. i was very young. we had a few good, some wonderful czech people we went to. first time we went to dinner. i remember it was a russian restaurant. i was very young because the best food was served in this very close russian restaurant and it took ages for the food to come. and apparently one of the first things i said was, there was silence in the restaurant and i said: how come that good people can be governed by a bad government?

and there was complete silence and i think we moved out of the restaurant very very quickly. and i remember my father he was coming back here, he was obviously looking for his family, looking for a jewish world that was no longer there. looking for an austrian and a german culture which was also... our rights create the modern renaissance of european culture up to 1938. but the most he was looking for a czechoslovakia that he knew. and he didn’t find it in the 70s. so it was almost from his side that his stories had been separated and we didn’t come back for another decade or so. it was a heart of czechoslovakia that they were part of in the 1930s which is still there.

and particularly brno in fact, particularly distinctively brno. and in some ways he didn’t find that. and for him culturally that was probably what you know reconciliation would have meant. and then we began to come back 10 years later, we came back a few times in the 1990s and the stories came out of some of these places. i came back with my uncle who is gary that i talk about, very fine uncle. he had not been there from 1938 when he had left and he came back in 1998.so 60 years later. he refused to use a map of brno because he knew brno in his head and he would go to the places that were the low-beer places and of course we got terribly lost.

and on the streets new things had come up. but he found those places. he found the house in hlinky opposite the new exhibition centre where he would come out every day and there would be this huge exhibition centre, the biggest meeting in europe of europe. not of czechoslovakia, you couldn’t say it was german or jewish, we all contributed in our way. and we went to the glass house and for me it was very much a house. i love architecture so it was one of the most beautiful houses but it’s not actually. what’s distinctive is it is the finest home. and for me that required a great architect which was mies and we see bits of that. it required a client.

i mean 95% of great architecture they don’t meet the client. and it required brno. in the artisanship that he found here, the details which dani and ivan know so well and can bring back to the place, the woodwork, the way the paint, the layers are put together. the houses he built in germany were more traditional. there was something also that brings a brno story. but they went to these places and we went to the other three brothers’ some of the houses and he got his passport back which he was very proud of. and he found a bit of himself after 60 years. so that was the start and for me it’s a start of a story

and i hope this time is the beginning of making those stories which i think the low-beers have to contribute and some of the issues of brno and its rightful place together. i’d like to mark them out a little bit more. so i would certainly like plaques on some of our places. to be able to show this is maybe where there was a story which was low-beer and which was brno and was european. certainly showing some of the stories of escape that we’ve been collecting in the museums so what happened next, some of these issues that we see in refugees. and not forget the nazism divided us from the jews. but it divided the czechs and the germans. i mean these are the two things it tried to do. so some of those stories coming back. and we have a concert.

we have a small trust that supports some of the histories of the families. some of the translation. we have a concert where we support czech musicians every year in england in leamington spa which people might not know is where the czech army was stationed during the war. so on our side we hope we can contribute further, deepen it’s feeling as some of the places as a home and also share some of the stories which we think you’ve given us back today. but we can also contribute much further. in the places that you see in brno. please, mrs ruth guggenheim wants to respond. may i ask you a question?

when i hear you, i have the feeling that you are looking forward, that you are full of hope and there is no conflict for you. but maybe i misunderstood you. so i really wonder how it is for you as well these days and when you hear me talking about it? so you mentioned the days. but i do see something special in these few days that we’ve been here but then we go home. the house empties. the places of my factory, the schindler’s ark which is one of the greatest... i mean it’s the greatest probably story the most known of the war and it happens in czech, in moravia. and it’s probably quite a moravian response that jews were saved

and it’s in rubble. so we go back and there’s a factory in rubble. and some of our stories are also, there’s a lot more to be told. so i did feel that hope in these few days but also quite a responsibility going forward. to bring those stories back, to tell them more fully and you’re right to deal with a lot of the conflict to do in each one. and they talk about a great period in czechoslovakia in the 1930s and it’s still part there but there’s clearly lots of things to work through for brno in particular to take a place that our family knows it has and it can take in europe. we left as refugees. so i certainly have been collecting the stories of what happened in 1938 and they’re extraordinary stories of conflict and escape and some of them don’t escape.

i mean they are the stories of refugees. but i guess i’m also looking forward because i do think this can be the beginning of working through some conflicts some very positive components where we can in a small, you can contribute certainly it’s a being a low-beer, we can contribute in a small way to some of the discussions, conflicts, issues which very much were and are and will be part of what it is the special about brno. please, mrs å abatovã¡. i would like to say that i am a little ashamed

of what we owe to our former fellow citizens in history and to their descendants. and i appreciate that sort of generosity in relation to the fact that they have not applied for restitution and decided to leave the family property in an ownership of the czech republic. and i think that the absolute minimum we owe is to make the history of those houses become present and not only in terms of the architectural aspects because when you visit the house you learn a lot of information about architecture but nothing about the people who used to live there. and this applies to all the situations.

they are not just houses, stones and beautiful boards but there were people who used to live here and they had to escape and they had children who are still maintaining a great relationship with this town. just as i said at the beginning – my childhood memory of this was a great abstraction i knew nothing about specific stories and i think it is our great moral responsibility to bring those stories back to brno history, to these villas and enable the descendants of the original owners to say their opinions. how they want things to happen. i felt really bad and was very ashamed when mrs daniela told me

that there was practically nothing about the family told within the tour. in the past they were even told during one of those tours that none of the descendants is alive. and that made me feel terrible. i think we really do have the obligation to make the history specific again and tell those stories and let the descendants of the original owners to influence in some way what is going to happen with each and every one of those villas.

and of course, this is not just about those three villas. it is about the jewish presence in the city of brno as well as in the whole republic, of course. i would like to add that the history together with finding out about the existence of these families is 15 years old and i hope we will no longer learn such disinformation about these houses. we will be only learning more and more about the families. and that’s the purpose of this meeting, too. before i give the opportunity... we’re approaching more or less half the time of our meeting. so before i give the word to our audience, because the aim is to have questions coming from the audience and therefore i invite you to think about it and raise your hand.

somewhere is my colleague who will hand the microphone. but before that i’m going to bring another topic. and i will turn to you, mrs å abatovã¡. it’s already been mentioned. the history was disrupted. the exile, escape, expulsion, some sorts of uncertain journeys, “a luck” of those who survived. but many were not that lucky, they did not manage to save their lives or at least leave early enough. we are all certainly aware that without the helpfulness of the countries where these people took refuge, or were given exile, we wouldn’t be able to hold this discussion here this way.

i realize that this is perhaps a rather complicated question but we can feel an increase of xenophobia of some sort or nationalism in the air. the question is...perhaps even antisemitism in certain moments. there is a sense of nervousness about the migration wave here, which is understandable. but what do you think? can this be compared with the situation then? is there a parallel here or is our world now completely different and going in totally different direction? what is your opinion on this? of course it can be compared

because we know that many of those people who are trying to escape, especially recently are escaping from war, from terrible warfare and they are fleeing to save their own life and life of their children. and if the czech republic is not willing to accept these people, and not even those we have committed to accept two years ago, in my opinion it is a great shame. a great disgrace of the czech republic and its political representation. last year i was present during the national remembrance ceremony in terezã­n

and i was completely outraged when one of the officials, a member of the union of freedom fighters, expressed his xenophobic opinions during his official speech and spoke explicitly against the acceptation of refugees. at that point i felt awful. but i was happy about the fact that next speaker was karol sidon, the chief czech rabbi who was supposed to say a prayer, the kaddish. and i was happy because he opposed this nationalist speech, and reminded us all that the same happened to many jews at the onset of nazism in late 30s when they were looking for countries who would accept them and some of those countries rejected them.

and had not at least some of them been accepted, they would not have survived either. so, of course, the situation now is similar and it is related. mrs daniela said it beautifully. she said that if we are unwilling to accept people who are trying to escape from the horrors of war or a great poverty, we lose our human nature. as i might have already said, this meeting was planned from the very beginning from the moment we even started to think about meeting of the families. we intentionally planned it as a meeting with the citizens of brno. one of the reasons was to show that these families are here, they exist and they have their opinion.

so we hoped it would arouse a discussion with the brno citizens. so please, feel free to ask, don’t be shy and we can start. i can see the first hand here on the right side. good evening. i think it is very important that people do come back sometimes even though they’ve experienced hard times here. i personally would like to say that i’m grateful that you have come back here. but i would like to talk about something else but the villa and the family because a lot has been said about that already, but we do not talk about those few monuments

which represent the land of moravia. we are now inside the city hall which used to be a moravian country house, and thatâ´s why statues of roman emperors are here, the seat where you for example are sitting once was a seat of the moravian governor. so i would like to tell you, maybe we should ask ourselves the question: the black field street? why this name? there are no fields anywhere here, black field was never a community, nor a village. and it’s not a very optimistic name either. when people come to brno from different countries from all over the world, when they visit their family, they usually want to see the villa.

if that street was called the tugendhat lane, there would be no need for translation. with the lã¶w-beer family, i’m sorry but that would be a bit difficult for slavs in moravia, but tugendhat, that sounds the same in the slavic language as it does in yiddish, in german language, it sounds the same everywhere. why do we not call the street tugendhat-gasse today? that would cost us nothing. and there’s one more thing. this land is what we have all in common, whether the jews, non-jews, slavs, german-speaking people, we all left this country almost at some point. well, thank you but either you have a question or a lecture. so my question is, and i did ask that question here in brno several times during these past few months:

what can we do altogether that we in the city of brno, as in town lomnice with its only 1,000 inhabitants, will have a large representative jewish-moravian museum? i hope that a brighter future lays ahead and that we will remember the story of the family tugendhat. thank you. thank you. it was a little too long but thanks. does anyone want want to respond to that? no reaction neither from the audience nor from the panel. so there’s another hand raised up here. please.

thank you very much for all of this. i think it’s a great honour to the family to be here and to receive this beautiful talk especially by the ombudswoman. i really appreciate what you had to say. i just want to add something which is thatwhen the family is represented in the house, it’s very important to do it without resorting the stereotypes about jewish people or rich people. and that’s very difficult to do. so i would like to invite you to consider putting a member of the family on the commission that represents the house. i think we would feel very good about that and i think it would improve the way in which the house is displayed to the public.

the other thing i want to say is that while we remember the tugendhats and low-beers we should also think about the poor jewish, poor jewish people and people who didn’t survive and didn’t get out or got out under different circumstances and i would like to see the whole jewish situation represented not only through the tugendhat and low-beer villas and the state and so on but in some other ways that speak to the entire community and isn’t so class-based. thank you. the next, please. i just wanted to echo what michael has just said. michael low-beer. and to say that i totally agree

that the family, all those years ago, were lucky enough to be so affluent to build such a beautiful building. but i think it’s incredibly important to remember all the jewish people who weren’t quite so affluent and in this town and i think you know some sort of commemorative museum to those jews to remember them is incredibly important. you know it’s not all about buildings. and monuments. it’s about people. is there any other question or reaction? so take your time and think about it. please, here. i would like to ask whether that legacy of your ancestors had started here and what they built for several generations, and it was the textile industry,

whether any of the further generations continued in this legacy? or is it going on? and where? and how? that’s an interesting question. that’s possibly something we haven’t asked, yet. do we know it or do we not. so i work for the world health organization. i work in public health. i think most of the family when they left and they were refugees and actually many of them found it very difficult to get out. certainly they were three brothers in the factory, there was also a sister mitzi and her son who stayed behind and didn’t get out. many of them hit frontiers, that’s in 1938. europe closed them one after the other.

too much unemployment, too much... we don’t want to import racial problems. it’s too difficult. and they arrived in france. every school child apart from... this is eliå¡ka who couldn’t leave for england she’s not allowed to just to go back into nazi europe. she then goes to africa where she’s bombed by the english. she arrives then 6 months later in brazil with a visa and the brazilian say you’re being there for longer than 6 months your visa is no longer valid, we’re sending you back. so they really did and this is what i put in the title arks – they are uprooted and they had to leave a life behind and certainly my family when i look at each of the brothers, they wanted to, as they did in being part of brno and czechoslovakia, they wanted to fit in.

they became professionals. they became doctors, psychiatrists... and my father became a doctor. they met some anti-semitism also where they arrived. but they rebuilt the family. and they rebuilt a family that’s in the people but is also in the stories. and stories of people who didn’t survive and some that came back. so no, we didn’t produce. there were some factories but we didn’t produce what was formed in brno afterwards. and i also want to remember some of the other places which were mentioned. our factory which was schindler’s ark is now rubble. we need to think what can possibly be done about that.

it’s a very distinctive place with stories. some of the other houses that we walked through that you can mention them. i agree the factories for me they’re not just places but they could be turned into a museum and tell some of the jewish stories because there’s a lack of a monument here. and i certainly see in some of the family on the other side they have much of the memory. mies said the devil is in the detail. and they have the thousand details of what a home looks like and how you the colour of the fabric what was done inside it and you should really use that in more of a partnership.

the places are important. i actually do think places are important. for memories, for telling a story but we need to link them back to the people and to the stories and to the family and that’s what i would say in that statement. thank you. before i ask the ladies to react, let me remind you one important thing. just a moment, thank you. if there’s anyone interested in these families and their histories and their current situations, there is a family tree which has been produced as one of the outcomes of this meeting. a great deal of that could have only been done thanks to mr daniel low-beer, so thank you for that. this family tree includes current situation of the families.

so what branch these people come from, where they were born, what they do for living now. so it is sort of a picture of what these families actually do now. so now mrs daniela. no one is now working in the textile industry. my sister is a psychoanalyst, i am an art historian, my brother ernest is a philosopher. my sister hanna, who died, worked in different jobs but eventually she was a vice-consul of the austrian embassy in montreal and herbert worked in venezuela as an insurance broker. but nobody worked in the textile industry.

thank you. there was another question. the gentleman here. my name is haberhauer, i’m from germany and i basically have three points that i would like to mention. they refer to the whole breadth that i see about this discussion but just did not see it with a detail. i really like the presentation of the villas, the architecture and of course the whole war and post-war development of the family, no question. secondly, i see the factories here in this country, there are few ruins for me to look at from the outside, if i mention that

and i think that in general the czech undertaking cannot be reproached because in fact the textile industry has actually declined throughout the european area and all attempts that i have come to know at one or the other company have not been successful. i exclude the cement industry but in terms of the textile industry, those who deal with it are aware that unfortunately there was not much to be done. so far i have not discovered the third point, yet and that’s why i would like to mention the name robert bosch,

a german entrepreneur with solid roots here in the czech republic as well. and i would like to build on the question of social achievements, social success of the era of lã¶w-beer from start to finish. that is important to me because i think that the culture of the lã¶w-beer company with regard to the question of social benefits for the working class is something that is absolutely essential in this day and age. thank you. yes, that is a very interesting moment. an absolutely incredible moment actually. the social policy of the lã¶w-beer family had been ahead by 50 or so years

of for example tomã¡å¡ baå¥a and the way tomã¡å¡ baå¥a cared for his employees. you are right, it is absolutely incredible history. please, another question back there. thank you for this opportunity to say something to you all. i’m a direct grandson of one of those industrialists august lã¶w-beer. and i’d like to invoke some of his spirit into this room. he was an extremely practical person. and one of the things that i’ve noticed and i feel that this meeting here is an important meeting, it feels to me like a turning point.

a reconciliation moment. and a turning point whether we are jews, germans, czechs or anything at all. or nothing at all. and as a very practical person i noticed that part of the czech culture, is to find things incredibly difficult. so if we listen to the story of the restoration of the tugendhat house, practically this should have taken no time at all. but actually it was difficult and it took over 20 years. and part of the culture even today i believe is to say it’s not easy, it’s really difficult.

and i think invoking the spirit of my grandfather here i would like to propose a czech revolution. and the czech revolution which i started with this young lady here yesterday is to ban this phrase: it’s very difficult. and i’d like to say that here we have the first person in the czech republic who is now not allowed to say it’s very difficult. so from now on i’d like to invite all of the residents in this room to say it’s very easy to change things. and i do that once again in the spirit of my grandfather

who really really really did manage to change a lot. and was part of the grand expansion of part of your history. and my history. thank you very much. no, right behind you, sorry. no, just a moment, just a moment. i would like to react. that was very critical. okay but i would like to add that from my point of view the creators or the initiators of the miracles of reconciliation and the initiators of the meeting brno festival are trying to say and show that it is possible. first the lady here and then i saw a hand right at the back door.

please, madam. good afternoon, i would like to thank you very much, too for the opportunity for all of us to meet here. i just wanted to say that the first time i learned about the families from those houses in brno it was thanks to the book written by kateå™ina tuäkovã¡ whose name has not been mentioned yet. for me it is very important to point out that it was kateå™ina tuäkovã¡ who wrote that very important book about expulsion of gerta schnirch from brno.so thank you very much for this book which in my opinion helps us a lot to find out more about brno history. i would also like to say that i cooperate with the faculty of economics and administration in brno

and in the previous semester i gave my students topics related to these houses. that means, all of the students of the faculty of economics and administration in my class had to create a presentation about at least one of the houses or one of the families who used to live in brno. this was my way how i could contribute so students know more about brno history. so that’s one thing. but i would also like to mention or ask in regards of the property situation whether there’s somebody who could explain it more specifically how it was with the villa tugendhat over the years?

and i would also like to ask the family members who are here today a question. if the story was completely different and the house was still yours what would the story by like today? or what kind of life would go on there today? what would be the story? thank you very much. yes, thank you for your question. mrs ruth guggenheim, please. that is an important question. i don’t think that any of us could live in this house. we could not afford it and besides we have our own lives in a completely different cultural context.

but in recent years when especially my sister and my brother-in-law have been so striving for this house i have had an idea in the course of these efforts, that was to establish a fund named foundation and we as a family could have a seat in this foundation and a say in forming and restoring the house. this is not an idea that is completely crazy because there are many examples of houses, that are important due to their architecture where this has been tried and there are also examples where in this foundation not only family is represented

but where the family would have been financially compensated. thank you. there was a raised hand here in the front. but i would like to comment the previous question because mrs kateå™ina tuäkovã¡ who was mentioned and praised as the book author is here today with us as the director of meeting brno festival. so please, do not stand in the back and take a seat here in the front. and you can tick a box for marketing. that was a lovely promotion of your book. another question, please. my name is polã¡k and i am a citizen of this city and i am very happy to be it. i would like to take this opportunity to thank all the organizers of this meeting and all such events

which bring us people together. because i think today's world should not only be about technology, economy, but it should be about relationships, human relationships, relationships within families, relationships among citizens, within towns, cities and within the state and even within europe. and i am very glad that we are part of european union and i want to take this opportunity and support all the authorities that do all in their powers to keep the union, our home, to be a peaceful place so that we live here peacefully, our generation, our children and grandchildren. i would also like to thank all the lovely guests whom it was a pleasure to meet and i just want to say that even though i’ve lived in brno for 58 years, i was born in bratislava

and i’ve been through similar experience as our guests here because i haven’t seen my grandmother and my grandfather, my uncles and my aunts since 1945. but my wife bought me a birthday present to my 75th birthday and it was a one night stay in my grandmother’s house so i slept in my grandmother’s room after those fifty or sixty years. and so my final question to all our lovely guests is – how difficult it was having to leave brno and to look for a new home in different states, in different countries? thank you very much and have a lovely evening. i just wanted to respond to the few of the questions. and thank you very much for all the comments. one question and also the responsibility for the workers.

one of the things the women in the family did a huge amount on was to create the social services in these factories. they created some of the first pension schemes, education,they would visit people when they were ill and they would also.. some of the children as part of the factory would have a holidays as part of the factory. so there was this idea of a local level of a community, after the contributions of some of the fine women and that care for the people and their communities in those factories i think was important. i also wondered just to respond... couple of the other places where people said what could be done with them. and that’s a spirit of, i think, felix which was over there very practical and august, very practical, felix and south american brazil, we have people on walter.

and certainly they would want the stories and their recognition of the places. some of the smaller places, some of the other houses. the factory i think they would look at telling a wider story of jews in the city which is needed. schindler’s ark they would certainly want to tell the story, bringing the people and the stories back to that place quite practically to take one. and i think in all the places they would like to see the people in the stories put with the places that they’re down in partnership. so that some of the places and what happens to them there’s a huge amount to gain from them being all those thousands of decisions but also direction being associated when in partnership with the family. and i think that probably is very important for each of those places.

whatever their status and as they go forward. and then i think the last question was what was it like starting a new in a new place? the last question was starting anew in a new place. i think back to the ancestors and when they came, they were refugees. they were part of something very special here. and this is the white part that i really wanted to show of the story. and you’re right, there’s a very dark part which comes out in certainly the conflict during the war and in the story of schindler’s ark there’s a very fine story to tell to czechoslovakia. but it’s one among 6 million of very poor stories.

but those refugees, they often come with actually quite limited means by the time they’d come into the country. and yet they kept their stories, they kept something of czechoslovakia and they rebuilt. and you can see quite quickly within generations they were refugees who they then become part of other cultures, they created professions, they educated themselves. but they also looked to europe and they also looked to czechoslovakia which is why it’s being very important to come back here. but i think it does show that people can be integrated not easily but europe and beyond europe accepted us finally the ones who survived and got out, and they became part of the hundred low-beers which are in every part of the world,

even though their history is here in brno and they’re coming back to contribute a little bit to the place where the people, the stories and the places were together. and hopefully many of the difficulties is what we do next, it’s the future and how we bring that forward. and i think that is important, also i’m glad you mentioned that story of how refugees one can rebuilt but also they don’t forget where they came from. and putting together those people, places and stories. just a brief reaction to what you mentioned earlier that those places should tell their stories. without discussing anything like that, this is exactly one of the topics or one of the objectives of this year’s meeting brno.

a project called “walking through jewish brno” was created. there is also a website – www.stezkybrno.cz. so this website was launched, a new map was published and some of the places were equipped with information media. it is a joint effort with the students of the university of technology. so it is our joint idea i would say. do you want to respond? no. so another question, please. any hands raised? please, here. so first of all i would like to greet the descendants of the tugendhat and lã¶w-beer families. my question is – it’s not long after the reconstruction of the last of the three villas was completed. actually the villa å å¥astnã½ and villa lã¶w-beer.

and i want to ask basically how you feel about the way the buildings were treated during the communist period and about the approach to their restoration and reconstruction later? if i understand the question correctly, you are asking me how do we relate to these reconstructions. these are three very different houses and the handling was also very different. as regards the villa tugendhat or the tugendhat house you probably know it’s true that we have simply endeavoured for decades to be involved and we have partially succeeded to be able to participate here. this was especially my husband, ivo hammer, who is by a pure luck an art historian and a restorer a he is one of the few restorers

who are familiar with the restoration of modernist architecture and there is only a few of them. it is a coincidence that he just happened to have six colleges to examine the materials of the tugendhat house and then he organized a big convention “materiality”, where a few specialists from all over the world came together on an international level. and from this circle the city of brno created a small group which we named the international expert advice committee thicom, which then gave the city of brno advice on restoration and the city was to decide which advice to accept and which not. it means that in the end there was quite a lot of people who worked together and i would say that overall the restoration of the tugendhat house sets an example on an international level. in case of such an important object it should always go on like this

that international community is involved and that is basically the principle i would say for a restoration to be well done. there are some details which we regret very much, where we think that it has not gone well, but these are often details that can be changed should you want to. especially the new furniture, textiles, carpets, the curtains which i would very much like to be replaced for a better quality products at some point. but in principle, i think, all went well. but there are also moments that are hard to understand why there were mistakes done during the restoration.

essentially the main flaw was that the slope of the stones of the terrace went to the faã§ade and that allowed the water to get into the house. my husband had been warning them during the restoration but nobody listened to him and water has been getting into the house for five years now, of course, causing incredible damage and for five years the damage has not been repaired, the only thing they did was to fix the ceiling in the living room which was the only place where the damage was visible. we have repeatedly drawn attention to this but in the meantime i really don’t know we haven’t been informed so i don’t know whether the damage has already been resolved. so this was about the house tugendhat. as regards the house å å¥astnã½, i cannot comment

and as regards the house lã¶w-beer which was renovated, not restored, it was renovated, but we were in no way involved in that. so you also mentioned we’ve been through war, we’ve been through communism where the stories weren’t told. we’re going through some difficult periods in europe. so there’s still a lot to reconcile and restore, it doesn’t happen. and it doesn’t happen either in places or in stories that easily. i think i saw something more in the last couple of days that can certainly go a lot further. i see some of the places that we have, the ruin of schindler’s ark, the one concentration camp where the jews were saved, not exterminated. and it’s rubble. i see the rubble of a factory in brno which could be something

towards explaining reconciling the history of brno but also of the family. and some of the houses we have on hlinky 3 which were family homes looking over the international exhibition. they could be, they need to be recognized as homes in some form or another. and i’ve also seen the family what happens when the family play and live in the house, in the tugendhat house and it becomes something of a home which makes me think it’s only half reconstructed, yet. there’s a lot more of the partnership with the family because it is their homes and it adds hugely to the actual architecture and details and the meaning and the stories

when they are developed in partnership. so i felt it was the beginning. and maybe halfway there and there’s lot more difficult but also some very fine things that we can do with brno to really create some of the finest stories and places that are in europe and not just the houses. but some of the stories during the war, some of the sense of europe that my family grew up with in a faraway place in england, it was a very fine brno and czechoslovakia. so i think for me it’s half the reconstruction of many of the places is half way there and we have a lot to do going forward. my name is john low-beer.

i’d like to thank the people of the city of brno for welcoming us here. it’s been a wonderful experience and there’s been a lot of good will and also i appreciate the context in which this is happening and the recognition of the problem of refugees today and parallels between what happened in the past and what we are seeing unfolding before us today. but i would also like to say that i think it’s easy to be a bit self congratulatory about you know all the good feeling that’s being generated and so on. but you know i came back the first time to svitã¡vka in 1963. and i’ve come back occasionally over the years.

and i have made some friends here at least and made contact with people who are friends of my father’s. and after the velvet revolution when law was passed permitting people to make claims for property restitution i worked to get back a property, an apartment building that my mother’s family had owned in prague and it was extremely... ultimately she was successful, but it was extremely difficult because there were a lot of legal barriers, obstacles that had to be overcome and many other people including most of the lã¶w-beers with regard to their property they couldn’t meet the requirements. and i think you know this is a little bit like

when somebody in a family dies and they have property and there’s a will and this leads to the most terrible fight in the family. and all of a sudden relatives who were on very good terms before are not speaking to each other. and it’s not really about the property. it’s a kind of symbolic thing on well who did this parent love more or how are the brothers and sisters treating each other. and it’s a sort of similar feeling i think that some members of the family might have that yes, this is very nice but what about the property. and it’s not really at all about the money i don’t think. it’s more of the feeling that some things are easy to do

but what about the things that are harder to do. that those were not always done. so i just think that that should be said and recognized. thank you. here in the front seats, please. yes. i would just like to respond to the question about what we thought about the house during the communist period. and while in the communist period maybe the restoration wasn’t done so well, the house was put to a really good use. and if you’ve seen the movie about the tugendhat house there are wonderful memories there from women who were treated there for scoliosis and it’s very very moving for family members to see how that house was used. and also how those women later on appreciated having spent time in that house.

so our view of the communist period isn’t by all means all bad. we see very good things that happened during that period with respect to the house. i can’t see any raised hands so i’ll just talk a bit further, too. we still have some time so if there is somebody who would like to ask, please. we are slowly approaching the end of our meeting and the end of the three families meeting in brno. we are still going to svitã¡vka, to brnä›nec and to boskovice tomorrow. the reason why we’re going to boskovice is because whenever the lã¶w-beer family meets, addresses of all the members nearly cover the whole world.

but it was boskovice where this journey to the world began. so that’s what we’re doing tomorrow. but anyway, i think that it is possible to say first impressions, first outcomes. so what is the contribution of your family history as well as of this family meeting? what is the benefit? what are your feelings at the moment? so the family reunion was for us an overwhelming experience i think i can say that for everyone because we just... so you have to imagine that it is over a hundred people who have not seen each other for years, sometimes decades, sometimes never,

sometimes they have not even known about each other’s existence and we all meet here. and that is really something like an emotional overkill that is incredibly emotional and what we all think is wonderful is that we all, although we live in different parts of the world and sometimes have never seen each other, we actually understand each other and there is an amazing form of closeness going on. yes, it is very emotional and very important for us and we really want to thank the city of brno for making this possible and we think we are going to leave this city with mostly very good feelings. i hope that this will continue in the future

that we will freely approach each other, listen to one another and what is very important to me is that this is not finished. but i am very glad that i was able to experience these days both with my family and also especially with the people of the city of brno. so i echo many of those. there were families that actually lived quite closer together here. they played, they would go to each other’s houses. most from different branches remember the different houses. and one of the troubles i guess with that world being shattered and then refugees, they scattered throughout the world. and they’re quite distant from each other. certainly coming back together has brought all the different branches. which are actually much more than the houses. all the stories that have come in,

the places, some of the villages further out, leaving boskovice and brought the family together. so they were together in brno before the war and the recognition of the brno authorities for that effort in doing that. and i think we did feel something special in the places that they should be the more in partnership. that they’re not houses they’re homes and that adds something to them. to the way even people from outside will see them. and i’m talking also about some of the details of the factories, some of the details of the houses that we had. the way this went into moravia and into the villages and towns to the north. and i think that was something new that you gave us.

and something that needs to be, it’s difficult, needs to be continued. the places, bringing the people back in, and their stories and doing it in some ways in partnership. and it was also very important to listen. we heard many of the experts from brno. i met a lot of the people who are no longer here. so i met my father who is no longer here, my grandfather in some of these places. how they talked about brno, how they were part of the life here. and we brought those back together i think in brno. with all the conflicts and some of the difficult parts it’s a lot to go forward to capture that spirit going forward. but thank you very much in recognizing the name, in bringing the family together.

and the town in a certain way for a few days bringing that feeling of home to some of those places which is very important to their spirit. and before we finish, i’d like to ask mrs jana å abatovã¡ to say a few words. i would like to thank the city of brno, it’s authorities and especially to mr jeå™ã¡bek and mrs kateå™ina tuäkovã¡, the director of the festival because i think this is a great initiative. it’s a great initiative and i’m very grateful for being here and participating in this extraordinary event.

and it is a very good start to the future. thank you and we were very glad to have you here. before we finish the evening i’d like to ask mr matä›j holan, deputy mayor, to say a few words. good evening. i would like to thank you very much for today’s discussion, for all the positive comments but most importantly for the critical comments that we have heard today. i can promise you that they certainly won’t stay unaddressed and on the contrary i want to invite you to write down a list of comments based on your visits to the villas, on your stay here, and then send them to us. i will do everything in my power to make sure that in future the management of the villas,

their running will be held to the mutual satisfaction of both, the city or the other institutions as well as you because we are all well aware that morally it all still belongs to you and that’s why your opinions are essential and how you want them to be handled. i can promise you this on behalf of the city of brno and thank you very much again that you came and that you are not afraid to express your opinion. thank you for these important words at the end and i would like to wrap up this evening by saying that we do say it’s a historic meeting. sure.

however, i’m hopeful it’s not the last meeting. that even if we do not manage to organize such a big and official meeting again, nevertheless we will meet again. and i think and hope in respect to what mrs å abatovã¡ has said here before that this meeting was a step forward, and it was our goal, a step forward to change the abstraction which we talked about with a slight feeling that it probably wasn’t completely right, to make it more specific and i hope that all this will help you to bring the abstraction back where it belongs and that is life. that is specific.

thank you very much for coming. thank you. and thank you very much for being a great audience and have a very good evening.

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