František Lederer

František Lederer was born in July, 1930 in Teplice in a Jewish family. His father Richard was the co-owner of a textile factory and his mother Eliška did the housekeeping. The family had a very high standard of living. They lived in their own villa in Teplice and his father drove a Hudson. They went on vacation frequently to the sea-side resorts in Belgium. Sometimes, they would even fly to Belgium. The turning point was the year 1938, when bad times began for the family. First, they had to leave their villa and move from Teplice, (that was part of the Sudetenland that was annexed by the Germans in September 1938), to Prague. Here they became the object of disdain from their environment for their Jewish origin. Eventually, in October 1941, they were deported to the Lódź ghetto. In the Lódź ghetto, František Lederer lost his parents in 1942 and only six months later his only brother Jindřich Lederer. At age 12, he became an orphan and the fact that he survived the ghetto and later the concentration camp in Auschwitz equals a miracle. His life was saved by pure chance during the second selection in Auschwitz, that took place immediately after his arrival in the camp. After the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp at the end of January 1945, Mr. Lederer set out on a long return journey home via Hungary that took three months. After the war, he briefly lived in Prague before he returned to his native Teplice, where he then worked in the textile industry for forty years.

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