“Water thwarted it all.”
Liselotte Židová was born in Bruntál on September 13th, 1930 and she grew up in the village Spachendorf (Leskovec nad Moravicí) in Bruntál region. Her father Arthur Lipschitz was a German speaking Jew. Her mother Hedvika (nee Czesch) was a German Catholic. After 1936 the family started experiencing animosity from her German neighbours, which was continually getting more intensive. On October 3rd, 1938, after separating the Sudetes from the rest of Czechoslovakia the Lipschitzs had to hurriedly leave Leskovec. After their short stay in Olomouc and in Prague they settled down in Trojanovice at the foot of the Beskydy mountains. The sister of Mrs Židová mother's lived there with her Czech husband. The Lipschitzs experienced the war in Trojanovice; however, Arthur Lipschitz was transported to Terezín in 1944. He survived and returned in mid May 1945.
Most of her German relatives, including her mother's grandma who helped the Jewish part of the family during the war, were displaced to Germany. Arthur Lipschitz did not manage to prevent his German relatives from the displacement and he himself didn't get the Czechoslovak citizenship until 1947. In the meantime he lost most of his material possession, which was never returned neither to him nor to his daughter. These events are documented by a number of declarations and assessments that Mrs Židová keeps carefully saved.
The Lipschitzs returned to Leskovec after the war. Mrs Židová lived in Opava after that and after fifty years she moved to Olomouc where she lives till the present day. She finished her studies at the medical faculty in 1959 and then she worked as a doctor for 33 years. She married Ladislav Žid, they have got three children. Leskovec, the village where she spent her childhood and where her Jewish and German ancestors lived for centuries, was flooded by water of the dam reservoir Slezská Harta in the 90s.
Liselotte Židová gives you the impression of an extremely even-tempered woman. However, her fate belongs to the most dramatic ones. She lost most of her Jewish relatives during the war; both her granddad and her aunts died in concentration camps. All her German relatives except for her mother and aunt from Trojanovice, whose husband was Czech, were displaced after the war. The family possession was given out and it was irretrievably gone. The fate of this family, that did not belong to culprits in any way, neither on the one nor on the other side, shows perfectly well where the paths of nationalism controlled by the society can also lead.
