The Kallos Family Book 2022

38 • THE KALLOS FAMILY
The Ruttner family
For just over two and a half years after the war,
Elza Ruttner, was hospitalised in Prague, and then
Elza Ruttner (right), about 1947, when she was
recuperating in the Tatras, Slovakia, seen here
with her sister Lily (the author’s mother), who
was visiting. PHOTO PROVIDED BY ELZA RUTTNER.
Berta Ruttner,
the author’s
grandmother.
Photo taken
in postwar
Karlovy Vary.
PHOTO PROVIDED
BY ELZA
RUTTNER.
in a private clinic in the High Tatras, Slovakia, so
she could recover from lung damage caused by
pouring toxic fluid into bombs without wearing
protective clothing while she was a forced
labourer in Lübberstedt–Bilohe. Elza stayed in
Nový Smokovec, the same mountainous region
where Biri had once spent her summer school
holidays.
On finally receiving a bill of good health
in 1948 Elza joined her family of survivors in
Karlovy Vary, but their freedom was soon marred
by the communist coup of Czechoslovakia. Berta
Ruttner and her daughters Lily and Elza, together
with her one surviving son, Julius, emigrated to
Melbourne in 1949. Julius, who had survived the
war by escaping to Palestine in February 1940,
enlisted in the Czech division of the British army
there. The siblings all married and had their
children in Australia. The author was born in
Melbourne in 1956 to Lily Ruttner and Eugene
Hellinger. Berta, after the death of her husband
Avraham, did not marry again. She died in 1979
aged 80.
Berta’s nieces Etu and Hani Slyomovics, and
Baylu and Mindu Klein all survived. Etu emigrated
to Israel, where her two children grew up.
Hani, who married three times, was not able to
have children; she died of liver cancer at the relatively
young age of 54. Her family blamed her
early death on the toxic work she performed in
the ammunitions factory.
Baylu Klein emigrated to Melbourne, where
she had two children; her sister Mindu emigrated
to Birmingham in the UK where she also
had two children. Postwar, and before she moved
to the UK, Mindu spent six months in a sanatorium
outside Prague because she suffered from
shadows on her lungs, most likely the result of
tuberculosis.