Jana Teššerová (*1948)

Jana Teššerová (2022)

Jana Teššerová was born on August 4, 1948 in Kežmarok into an Orthodox Jewish family.

Her parents, mother Regina and father Leo, managed to hide in the house of the Žihal family and thus survive the Holocaust. We can include her in the second generation of survivors. As a child, she grew up with her parents and older brother in Kežmarok. Jane’s childhood was largely marked by the trauma of her mother, Regina, who lost almost her entire numerous family during the Holocaust. She recovered from these hard events for a very long time and she was accompanied by various health problems. In 1966, Jana graduated from Secondary grammar school of Pavol Országh Hviezdoslav in Kežmarok. She always believed that she would become a teacher. After graduating from secondaray grammar school, she applied to the Faculty of Arts of the P. J. Šafárik University in Prešov, which she successfully completed in 1971. Immediately after graduating from university, she married her husband and she went to Košice, where she began teaching at the Secondary grammar school on Šrobárova Street. Until 1993, she worked at this secondary grammar school as a teacher, after which she was elected director until 2009. During as a director, with the teaching staff, despite the difficult post-revolutionary circumstances, she managed to turn this secondary grammar school into a prestigious educational institution with a number of important graduates through hard work. After 2009, she continued to teach at the Medical High School Kukučínova for the next ten years, also in Košice. Despite his retirement age, she is very actively engaged in spreading awareness of the events associated with the WWII and the Holocaust. She regularly lectures at high schools, as well as primary schools, where she introduces pupils to the life of Jews in times of war. She is also the curator of the Ľudovít Feld Gallery in Košice.

The full story of the witness can be found in the online archive Memory of Nations.