"Shakespeare Saved My Life"

Identifier
irn36019
Language of Description
English
Alt. Identifiers
  • 2008.191.1
Dates
1 Jan 2007 - 31 Dec 2007
Level of Description
Item
Languages
  • English
Source
EHRI Partner

Extent and Medium

folder

1

Creator(s)

Biographical History

Eva Porges Rocek (May 29, 1927-June 28, 2015) was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia to local businessman Viktor Porges and his wife Anna Marie Bondyova. Eva was 12 years old when the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia in 1939, and her family was deported to Theresienstadt (Terezin), Czechoslovakia. There Eva was forced into slave labor at various jobs, including cleaning public toilets and being assigned to a youth corps responsible for growing crops. It is also in Theresienstadt where she met her future husband, Honza Robitschek (now Jan Rocek). She and her parents were deported to Auschwitz in German-occupied Poland in October 1944, where she and her mother were separated from her father, who was killed. Eva and her mother were then sent to the Kurzbach concentration camp, located in today’s Poland, north of Breslau (Wrocław, in Lower Silesia), from which they were sent on a death march in January 1945. They escaped from the march and were liberated by the Russian Army. After the war, they returned to Prague, where Eva reconnected with and married Jan in 1947. She earned a Doctor of Technical Sciences degree (the equivalent to a PhD) in chemistry, worked in pharmaceutical research, and had two sons,Thomas and Martin. The family escaped communist Czechoslovakia by moving to the United States in 1960, where Eva became a professor of chemistry at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Archival History

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

Acquisition

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection, Gift of Eva Rocek

Eva Rocek donated her memoir to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum on Feb. 9, 2008.

Scope and Content

Consists of one memoir, 84 pages, entitled "Shakespeare Saved My Life," by Eva Porges Rocek. In her memoir, Eva describes her family's history, her memories of the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia, the antisemitic laws and regulations, her family's deportation to Theresienstadt (Terezin) and then Auschwitz, her liberation by the Russian Army in January 1945, and her life after the war in the United States.

People

Subjects

Genre

This description is derived directly from structured data provided to EHRI by a partner institution. This collection holding institution considers this description as an accurate reflection of the archival holdings to which it refers at the moment of data transfer.