Victor Pohnert

Viktor was a keen sportsman and loved to ski and play tennis and swim. INickname Viki) He inherited his father's blue eyes but he had blond hair not chestnut like his father and my mother. His niece my mother's cousin Hanka Wiener adored her uncle Victor. He used to take her and Mum skiing. The water was so cold in the basin it froze but he was such a sportsman he just cracked the ice and used it to wash in. Mum and Hanna loved to ski with him. My cousin Dr Poetsch remembers Victor loved to ski in the Krkonose mountains with my mother Mimi. And he used to take her and her then husband Franta Nathan as well as Rudi Poetsch and sometimes uncle Tomi Poetsch too to the Austrian alps or the Swiss alps. When the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia Victor was skiing at Davos. He also loved St Anton. Hanna says he was a jokester and a prankster. Hanna went to a co-ed school in Smichov and Mum's younger brother Hansi was at the same school. I have a silver platter for excellence at the Matura for 1936 so I assume that was Hansi. It was called the Deutsches Staatsrealgymnasium in Prag III. Hanna's father invited Victor to join him in a choir singing for a performance of Lohengrin. Apparently Victor sang a silly song about a Mr Kohn whose son falls into the water. The rest of the choir laughed so much they couldn't sing anymore and Victor was chucked out of the choir. He would go skiing for 3 weeks every year at Davos in Switzerland.

Victor went to an expensive business school in Prague after finishing school in the city at a primary and middle school. After the middle school he attended a Handelsakademie (business school) which was a four year course. He was groomed to take over the family department store by his parents. In January 1913 he married Olga LEDERER at the Jerusalem synagogue in Prague. which is close to Wenceslas Sq. A few months later his grandmother Fanny LOEBL died in Teplice. In 1915 when Victor was 26 his younger brother Hans Walter was killed in WW1 in Russia. In April 1930 Viktor and his older sister Irma bought a summer house in the town of Zelizy north of Prague. They called it Villa Helene in honour of their mother Wilhelmine. In the next two years they added to the property by buying a plot of land adjacent to the house for a garden and another plot at the back where there was a forest. It was house number 94 in Zelizy on the main road in a valley. In 1950 the house was socialized by the Communist Government and half was taken by the State. Mum and Tomi kept a quarter each.

Victor worked in Vienna as a translator for the army during the war. He told his nephew Stefan in a letter in 1940 that he could speak English, French and Italian ( as well as Czech and German). In the same letter he mentions that he was studying art and advertising. He must have been a talented artist. He designed a letterhead for the business Firma Vigo the department store in Celetna street number 9. That was the building he and his father bought which housed the shop and six flats above it. Victor used a first floor apartment as his office.

His nephew Kurt Metzker told Tomi Poetsch his grandson that after the war ended in 1918 Victor went into the family business with his father Jacob. He looked after the easier part of the business said Kurt- shirts, men's underwear, women's underwear, ties, stockings for men and women, He moved to Celetna 9 and started Firma Vigo says Kurt.

He remembers how after one night at a restaurant Victor was drunk and shinned up a gas lamp pole aged about 40. He liked to go out and eat goulash. The first floor in Celetna was full of shirts. Victor had the biggest shop that sold shirts in all of Prague.

The records show that on 6 February 1923 Victor and his father Jakub Pollak bought the building in Celetna at number 9 with a shop and six apartments. The building had two frontages, one on Celetna and the other with a small separate shop on Stupartska. Victor was 34 and married with three children. He and Olga lived in Vesenska in P 1 when my mother was born in 1916.

On 10th February 1926 Victor bought the building at 8 Vinarska in Holesovice. He and Olga lived in one of the apartments. Suse and Rudi in another on the second floor, Mimi and Franta in another (apartment 10) and Hansi and Alzbeta in a fourth apartment. The rest were rented to tenants and there were three or four shops at ground level. During the Nazi occupation Victor lost his business as the Nazis took over all jewish shops and gave them to their supporters. This process was termed Aryanisation. At Terezin he worked as a guard.

After the war the Celetna shop closed says Kurt Metzker and it sold art supplies in the same building. He went to have a look and the director said he knew Hynek Fuchs Olga's grandfather..

Marriage record: PRAHA 2709 O 1913 (i) (30/66)

https://www.holocaust.cz/en/database-of-victims/victim/114135-vikto...

• Born 22. 05. 1889
• last residence before deportation:
• Prague, II
• address/place of registration in the Protectorate:
• Prague II, Jenštejnská 6
• Transport AAe, č. 972 (20.06.1942 Prague -> Terezín)
• Transport Em, č. 664 (01.10.1944 Terezín -> Auschwitz)
• Murdered

Yad Vashem has a map showing the route the trains took to Auschwitz via Dresden, Legnitza in Poland, Wroclaw, Opole and Katowice. In 1917 Viktor advsed the Police registration that he had left his parents home and was now living in Stockhausgasse 5 today its known as Vezenska st. That is where his wife Olga bore their first two children daughters Susanne and Annemarie. According to my cousin Dr Poetsch Viktor volunteered for the army and worked in the finance section.