Josef Bor

Josef Bor , also Joseph Bor , real name Josef Bondy (born July 2, 1906 in Mährisch Ostrau , Austria-Hungary ; died January 31, 1979 in Prague ) was a Czech lawyer and writer who survived Auschwitz .

Life

Josef Bondy was born in 1906 as the son of a Czech-Jewish family in Ostrava (Mährisch Ostrau) in the margraviate of Moravia , which was then a crown land of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. His father was the Dr. jur. Julius Bondy, his mother Anna Bondy, née Lustig. He attended the grammar school in Ostrava until 1924.

Bondy studied law at the University of Brno , he received his doctorate in 1929. He then worked as a lawyer in Ostrava.

During the Protectorate period , after the Heydrich assassination attempt in June 1942, he and his family were deported to the newly created Theresienstadt ghetto . His seventy year old father died there. He, his mother, his wife and his two small children were taken to Auschwitz concentration camp in October 1944 , where his family were murdered in the gas chamber immediately upon arrival . Bor himself had to do hard work in the IG Farben factory in the Monowitz concentration camp . In January 1945 he took part in the death march to Buchenwald . In the vicinity of Jena he was freed by the US Army with other comrades in suffering and returned to Prague.

He married again. His wife, Valy Gerda, née Tausik, had also survived the Auschwitz concentration camp. They had a son and a daughter. Until 1948 Bor worked in the Ministry of Defense. From the fifties to 1966 he worked in the planning of steel works and as a lawyer for large industrial companies.

In 1961 his autobiographical novel The Abandoned Doll ("Opuštěná panenka") appeared for the first time . In it, Bor describes the suffering in Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, Buchenwald and on the death transport. His novella Theresienstädter Requiem (“Terezínské rekviem”) was published in 1963, it describes the performance of Verdi's Requiem by the conductor Rafael Schächter in the Theresienstadt ghetto.

Works

• Opuštěná panenka . Illustrations by Libuše Stratilová. Prague: SNLP, 1961
  • The abandoned doll. Translation from Czech by Elisabeth Borchardt. Versions by Paul Lindner. Berlin: Book publisher Der Morgen, 1964.
• Terezinské requiem . Prague: Československý spisovatel, 1963
  • Theresienstadt Requiem. Authorized translation from Czech by Elisabeth Borchardt. Berlin: Book publisher Der Morgen, 1964
• The third. A poetic representation of the suffering and death of Jesus. A passion play that is not anti-Jewish. Heppenheim: Evang. Working Group Church and Israel in Hesse and Nassau, 1991, ISBN 3-92-699009-0 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Josef Bor in the catalog of the German National Library
• Josef Bor. In encyclopedia.com
• Bor, Josef. In: Theresienstadt Lexicon.

References

Josef Bor's Roman Opuštěná panenka between factuality and fictionality - Reinhard Ibler - Institute for Slavic Studies at the Justus Liebig University in Giessen