Live Interviews

With Mary and Astrid Bento

​As part of her research, Stav has been interviewing subjects to get a more personal point of view of the histories.
These interviews are hereby available to the public.

Subjects include:
​*Jano Bento, second eldest son of Irene and Peter Bento (descendants of Lorch family)
*Mary and Astrid Bento, two eldest daughters of Irene and Peter's daughters (descendants of Lorch family) - Coming soon
*Mohammed Sahraoui (acrobat with Althoff Circus between 1941-1950) - Coming soon

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Jano Bento
(Interviewed by Stav Meishar in May 2018, at the Pfungstadt Museum, with the help of its director Marion Roth)

This interview has been edited for clarity purposes. Asterisks (*) denote comments and footnotes; brackets ( [...] ) denote filling in the blanks.
Grammatical errors, for the most part, have not been corrected, and segments in German have been kept as part of the interview.

Audio version:

Video version:

* The Book Jano refers to is Der Clown und die Zirkusreiterin by Ingeborg Prior, published in 1998. The book includes interviews with Irene, Peter and others from the Althoff Circus, as well as comments from Prior herself.
* The Blumenfelds, mentioned in this interview, were one of the most prominent pre-WWII Jewish circuses in Germany, and many of its members were killed in the Holocaust.
* I was inaccurate in my memory of the fall of the Berlin Wall. It fell in 1990, not 1989. Nonetheless, Jano refers to "the end of the war" as the time when the divide between East and West Germany ceased to exist