The history of the Löw-Beer family between Schindler's List and Villa Tugendhat
The Ark of Life is a fascinating story of one family's survival and return to the places they came from. It tells the story of two successive escapes from the Jewish ghetto to the free world and follows the pilgrimage of the name Löw-Beer. The first escape began in 1848, when Jews began to build a promised land in the heart of Europe that allowed them to lead a modern lifestyle. They could not settle there, however, because they were sent back to the ghettos in 1938 when their culture was destroyed by the Nazis.
The confiscated family factory in Brněnec eventually became the Schindler's Ark, a concentration camp where Jews were not liquidated, but rather saved, as the Oscar-winning film Schindler's List by Steven Spielberg eloquently shows. The Löw-Beers then used the instinct that Noah had bequeathed them. They cut themselves off from their roots and set out on a second escape route. This dark side of the Second World War is the antithesis of the previous bright years, symbolized by their family villa Tugendhat on the slope towering over the center of Brno as the pinnacle of European architecture.
Daniel Low-Beer, a poet, writer and physician working at the World Health Organization in Geneva as an epidemiologist, is the grandson of the last Jewish factory owner in Brno.
