CZ5 Emigration

Narrator: A Jewish man from Prostejov
Reporter: Heike Knapova

On 5 May 1939 the Nazi Army occupied the former Republic of Czechoslovakia. I was born in a Jewish family and so my parents who foresaw what was going to threaten us tried to leave the Nazi regime.

On 9 May 1939 we left Prostejov, spent the night in Prague and went to the station to go on to Trieste, an Italian harbour. At the station we were checked thoroughly by offi-cers of the Gestapo. I remember that I started crying when the German didn’t al-low keeping the watch my uncle had given me when we had to say goodbye. The watch hadn`t been in the list of allowed things to take with us so the Germans simply took this watch then.

On 19 December 1939 we landed in Tel Aviv onboard the Italian ship “Galilei”. There we spent the war time until 1946. Luckily we didn’t feel much of the war. Nevertheless, we were bombarded and had to stay in a bomb shelter for many nights when The German army was in Egypt in 1941. The first bombardment came without any warn-ing on a summer day in the afternoon. I still remember exactly that then there had been a teacher in our house. He had been teach-ing Hebrew to my elder brother. Suddenly there were great detonations. We didn’t know what was going on. We were lucky that the teacher had been with us otherwise we would have played in the garden where the bombs had fallen.

My father having been an officer in the army knew what was going on. He opened all the windows so that none had been smashed like it did with the neighbour’s. At that event almost 200 people lost their lives.

In 1945 the war ended. My parents decided to go back to Prostejov, CZ. With the help of the UN organisation UNRA we were taken to a refugee camp called El-Shat near the Suez Canal in the Red Sea. Why there I still don’t know. The climate was terrible, in May there was 58° C. In this camp 600 mainly little children died of heat during one year.

What else? I remember having seen some shootings among Yugoslavian people. At that time people who were in favour of Tito fought against people who were in favour of General Michajlovic. Well, like today, there had been fights among Yugoslavs in 1946.