and demanded, "Doctor, come with me. I need you for a patient at Sedlice."
"Oh no. I'm not going that far," the doctor said.
Jerry took out his pistol and threatened him, "You will go or else!"
The doctor came back with him on the motorcycle. He examined me in the bedroom, then went to talk to Jerry and Anna. I couldn't hear what he was saying, but I imagined it was typhus. When they came back I said, "Listen, Anna and Jerry, please take me away. I can't stay here and infect you."
They denied it, and kept me a few more days. Then they heard about a temporary hospital set up in a school building nearby in Kralovice, and they took me there, promising to visit everyday. In the hospital I fell unconscious and didn't wake up for many days. About a week after I woke up, they closed the hospital; the war was over and they needed the space for the Russian military.
The Chlups took me back to their house, where I stayed for three more years. It was a quiet life. Jerry and Anna had a little grocery store; after I got better I helped them out. I did my job the whole day, waiting on people, selling flour, bread, beans, whatever we had. I sold, I did the books, I did the buying. Anna would sit there knitting or doing some other work.
I became used to them and was comfortable; it was like home. They were my parents, my brother, my sister, my whole family. There was no problem with my being Jewish; nobody besides them knew about it. I never told anybody, but Anna knew because I was naked when she picked off the lice.
One day I said to Jerry and Anna, "I'm going back to Poland to see what is left. Maybe I will find someone." In my mind I thought I would find somebody from my family. They gave me a rucksack full of food, and I set off for Hirschberg, which by then was part of Poland. I found the house where my wife and I had left our two crates when we thought we were going to emigrate to Chile. The wife of this family was German and had been able to save her Jewish husband's life. They told me that only Polish people lived in Hirschberg now. Of all the Jewish people who once lived in that city, this man was the only one spared.
They gave me the key to the cellar and I went down. The crates were still there, but they were open and all my clothes, my suits, nearly everything was gone. They told me that the S.S. had searched their house, looking for somebody one time. They found the crates and took everything away.
I did find two things I had hidden: my father's watch and a ring. I put them in the rucksack, went outside to sit on the steps, and wept. They were crying too. I had lost my whole family. Not one person was left from one hundred and eighty-eight relatives--not my wife, my child, my brothers, or sister. The lady wanted to give me something to eat, but I still had food that Anna had given me. I said no, and started back the same day. It was a sad encounter.
I went back to the Chlups, but now I had the desire to go far away, to emigrate. I wasn't accustomed to living in a little village; I had always lived in big towns. The year before I left for good, I took a job as the manager of a little store in Marienbad, about sixty miles away.
Anna came to visit every week bringing fresh food and clean laundry. She still looked after me.
If it wasn't for the Chlups I wouldn't be alive. There isn't another pair of people in the whole world who would have done what they did for me. When Jerry brought me to his home the first day, he opened the closet and showed me a shoebox with a lot of money in it, more than a hundred thousand crowns. He said, "Pavel, take as much as you want. Don't ask me. Take what you want." Another day he came home with a nice pair of shoes. I had boots from the concentration camp, but they were not a pair.
"What nice shoes you bought," I said. "Try them on so I can see."
"Oh no, I brought them for you."
Whatever they could do, they did for me. What Anna went through to help me, no one else would have, not my mother, not my wife, nobody. They did the utmost possible. So many died. I was on the verge of dying too. They really saved my life.
Herman Feder stayed with Anna and Jerry Chlup until 1948, when the Communists took over Czechoslovakia, making it a Soviet satellite. First he moved to the spa town of Marienbad, about an hour's train ride from Sedlice. He visited the Chlups frequently. A year later he met and married his second wife, Blanka. They soon emigrated to Venezuela where Herman, taking advantage of his concentration camp experiences, went into the shoe business, eventually owning a small shoe factory. When Castro came to power in Cuba, the possibility of Communist rule in Venezuela prompted the Feders to emigrate again, to the United States. They settled in Los Angeles in 1961. Every Sunday morning for nearly thirty years they talked to Anna and Jerry Chlup on the telephone, carrying on the tradition with Anna after Jerry's death in 1988. On January 17, 1992 Herman passed away at the age of eighty-seven.Herman Feder gave this interview in his west Los Angeles home in May, 1987.