Kurt Weber's home was not very religious, although his father, Edward Weber, was the last chairman of the Jewish community in Cieszyn. Kurt remembered that his father only visited a synagogue twice a year. The Webers were a family rooted in Cieszyn for centuries, where they lived in a tenement house at Głęboka street. Edward Weber owned a small leathergoods factory in Przykop, on the Olza River. Kurt Weber recalled: "At home, we spoke German, on the street we communicated with our friends using the Silesian dialect, and it was only at school that I learned the Polish language" (K. Weber, "Dokument podróży", Gdynia 2014, p. 17).
After the outbreak of World War II in September 1939, the city was seized by the Germans. Kurt with his mother Regina and his younger brother Piotr reached Przemyśl, and then Lviv, where their father joined them later. In 1941, the family was arrested by the NKVD. It happened accidentally; they were included in the transport when the neighbours were arrested (see K. Weber, "Dokument podróży", pp. 27–28.). The Webers were deported deep into the Soviet Union, where they spent the next war years in the Tajik Leninabad (now Khojant).
There, they most likely bought or got these two besamines. That's what Weber said when he handed it over to the museum; he did not remember them from their pre-war family home.
After the war Weber became a cameraman. He is the cinematographer of many important Polish films of the 1950s and 1960s, incl. "Zaduszki" and "Salto" by Tadeusz Konwicki or "Ludzi z pociągu" by Kazimierz Kutz. In 1955, he made "Pod jednym niebem", the first Polish documentary about the Warsaw ghetto. As a result of the anti-Semitic campaign in March 1968, he decided to leave for the Federal Republic of Germany. He died in 2015.
Renata Piątkowska
