Edita Sheldon with her husband on a visit to Europe

Edita Sheldon with her husband on a visit to Europe

This photograph was taken in Munich, when my Australian cousin Edita came with her husband on a visit to Europe; our picture was taken together with their friends. I'm the grey one, second from the left. Edita is to the right of me, standing behind her is her husband. Edita is the daughter of Ida Druckerova, my father's sister. Aunt Ida, Edita and my grandmother used to live in Nusle, a Prague neighborhood, before the war. Always about once a month I was tasked with going to visit them. Edita and I didn't hang out that much during our childhood. After all, she was a girl, plus somewhat older, she had her girlfriends. She spent the entire war along with Aunt Ida in Terezin. My aunt told me that my father got them off the transport two or three times, those are these things, they didn't go, someone else had to go... My aunt and cousin legally moved away to Australia, still before February 1948. Edita, who felt that better prospects awaited her there, went first, and then my aunt followed. She said to me that back in Terezin someone had read her palm, and predicted that she'd meet her future husband on a ship. But she didn't meet anyone during the whole long voyage from Marseille to Australia. It wasn't until right in Australia that she was apparently walking around on a ferry, and that's where they met. He's named Walter Sheldon and is a Hungarian Jew who was in England during the war, and then also moved to Australia. In Sydney Edita worked in various administrative jobs; she doesn't work any more, she's retired, but her husband is a workaholic, he's always working, even though he's already over 80. He goes on business trips to Europe and she accompanies him. She goes quite often, she's already been here ten or twenty times. And we speak Czech to each other, even though she occasionally has to search for a word here and there, her English is already better by now.
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