עדותו של מרום מייזל הוגו יליד 1928 Brno צ'כוסלובקיה על קורותיו כילד ב-Brno, ב-London, ב-Bedford ובאזור Wales

Name of Interviewee: Hugo Marom

Name of Interviewer: Ronit Wilder

Cassette Number: VT-7721

Date: October 15, 2007

Name of Typist: Cheryl Balshayi

Names:

Brno

London

Bedford

Luton

Q: The 15th of October, 2007, ג' בחשוון, תשספ. This is an interview with Mr. Hugo Marom. You were born as Hugo Meisl in Brno, Czechoslovakia at that time, in 1928. Can you tell me a little bit about your background, your family?

A: Yes. The Meisl family originally comes from Prague, and sometime during the end of the seventeenth century they moved to Brno. How and what, we have no record except what we find in the cemetery in Brno. I know very little about my father’s side of the family except that when the Germans came, they investigated the Meisl family because of the Meisl connection, so only by 1968, during the spring of Prague – Dubček who was then president gave permission to the Jewish community to a publish a book, or to the university, which published a book which was called “A Thousand Years of Jews in Bohemia”. And in that book are the beginnings of the Meisl family basically. Anyhow, I was born into the family as the second child because my older brother, or the firstborn, died very early due to an accident at home, and I was basically the second oldest and the youngest…

Q: But when you were born he was no longer alive?

A: That’s right. When I was born he was no longer alive. I was born in 1928, and in February 1930 my younger brother was born, who is now in Los Angeles, and one of the reasons why we are doing this interview in English, the main reason being so that he, who was only eight years old when we left Czechoslovakia, he knows very little about the background of the family. My father went to what was called “Opchodni Academia”, which is a commercial, economic school, and the reason being that his father has established a chain of two or three stores, basically boutiques, which also had…one of them was the main children’s toy store in the town. So he expected his sons – he had four sons and three of them survived the war – to continue in the business. So my father basically ran one of the stores where his brother, Walter, who is the father of my first cousin, who is the only survivor of concentration camps, and lives in the United States – another reason why I am doing this in English. – ran the store which had a very, very large children’s toy department.

Q: I can imagine that your childhood was especially cheerful with such a store in the family?

A: I would say that we were brought up in a very strict home, not to benefit from the fact that our uncle had a children’s toy shop, but I must say that we did have at one time an electric train, which we had to keep under our parents’ double bed, like a tunnel, so we did have an electric train. But apart from that, we were more into sports rather than into toys.

Q: So it was in this case the classic situation when the shoemaker goes barefoot.

A: Something like that. A very good example, yes, in a way. My mother was the strong character in the family. She came from a very, very old Czech family from a place called Sušice, in Bohemia, where we have records in the Prague archives about the family. We know more about the Kubie family, which is my mother’s side, than we know of my father. Details from the sixteenth century. So having said that, my mother was into sports from her youth, from the age of…I don’t know when they started swimming. My grandfather was a banker in Vienna, sent by a Czech bank, and his children, all his five children, two boys and three girls, of whom my mother was the oldest, were into sports like “Koach Vienna”. My mother was a teacher, skiing teacher, in winter, and tennis in summer.

Q: But you say that, and today it sounds obvious, but at that time, if we are talking about the beginning of the twentieth century, it was very unusual for girls to do any sports in public. It wasn’t so obvious as it is today. You say that your mother began as a child.

A: Yes, absolutely true. The reason being they lived about two hundred yards from the Danube, from the Danube Canal, which was used for swimming competitions. That was the first reason. And the second reason was that was some sort of a tendency in the whole family, because of her two brothers who were into sports, so there was the location. The fact that in Vienna was one of the best sports organizations in Europe at that time helped her to participate in the Olympic Games as a swimmer, and winning prizes. And later on, as you said, you are absolutely right, at that time there were very few women skiing teachers and very few women into, I would say, even tennis, tennis from the point of view of teaching tennis. In other words, at that time there was no professional tennis, but most of the teachers were men, and our very good friend of the family, Tonda Sekal, who was responsible for – later on, as we go on, we’ll hear more about him – was jointly with her a skiing teacher and tennis in summer.

Q: When you were talking about your maternal grandfather – is the fact that he put an emphasis on sport with his children, was there any connection to the fact that at that time in Germany and Austria, began the movement of the new Jew, the Jew with the muscles, the emphasis on physical activity?

A: You are absolutely right. In other words, I would say, first of all, my maternal grandfather was a colonel in the Austrian army.

Q: It was the Austro-Hungarian…

A: It was the Austro-Hungarian, of course. And already the fact that he was in the army brought about a tendency to assimilation, not from the point of view of religion, but from the part of view of activities, as you mentioned. So I think he transmitted this to his children and that was the reason why the whole family was, I would say, they were orthodox in the sense that they kept all the Jewish holidays, but they participated with the non-Jews in all the sports activities. And as you say, I would say most probably Vienna was the beginning of European sports activities in the Jewish community. And they were very successful. As a matter of fact, there is a person living in Tzahala, by the name of Fried, who played land hockey in the national team, in the “HaKoach”, and then in the national team, together with my uncle, who was the youngest of the five, who was also in “HaKoach” in Vienna before they had to leave Austria during the Anschluss, when Hitler moved into Austria.

Q: Which sport you liked most as a child?

A: I was brought up on the tennis court from a very early age, picking up balls from the age of five, I would say, or six. And on skis from the day that they made skis short enough to be on them.

Q: You are talking only about skiing, not about ice skating?

A: We lived above an ice-skating rink, virtually above. The apartment – it was a four-story house which still exists – is above a park. And in the park, right under our windows, were tennis courts in summer, and in winter they filled them with water and they froze and became ice-skating. I was not fond of ice-skating. In fact, people said, when they were trying to teach us ice hockey, that I used to stick to support myself so I wouldn’t fall down. So I wasn’t fond of ice-skating. I was very, very fond of, and I am still very fond of, skiing, not that I am as good as I should be from the many years that I have spent, because I am not a natural skier. And tennis I love very much, and I play tennis to this day.

Q: You are talking about individual sport. How about football and some team sports?

A: Football was very popular in Czechoslovakia. As popular as ice hockey, for the national team and so forth.

Q: And also in Czechoslovakia volleyball?

A: Volleyball, yes. Volleyball. That’s right. Well, we played volleyball, I would say that we played volleyball already at school. Football was not, in the Czech schools was not organized the way it is today. We usually played football with a tennis ball in the park. That was very popular among the children.

Q: Football with a tennis ball?

A: That’s right. Football using a tennis ball, and I would say that only by 1938, I think, although we had footballs in the store, my uncle’s store, I remember in 1939 was the first time we received proper leather football that you could inflate and so forth. So I was very much, my brother and I were both into football to the extent that during the war we played in the Czech national team, both my brother and I.

Q: Children’s teams?

A: It was an under twenty-one team. We didn’t do so badly compared to the other teams that we played against.

Q: I can assume that at that time you weren’t much of a reader, although I see here many books, but…

A: I was always very much into reading.

Q: With the football, with the skiing, with everything else?

A: That’s an interesting point. There was so much sports during the war in England because it was part of the curriculum at school. In other words, you would most probably spend till twelve o’clock, from eight to twelve in class, and from, let’s say, one o’clock till four or five on the either cricket, rugby or football pitch. We didn’t play tennis at school. It was considered at that time…some of the girls’ schools in Bedford, where I was during the war, sometime during the war, they played tennis, but the better schools. I am speaking about…I didn’t go to such a very good school at the school, so the main issue was cricket and football. But by the time it was five o’clock in England it was dark. So in the evening we didn’t go out. There was no evening activity that I remember ever. Maybe a birthday party here and there, or…No, I don’t remember anything except reading, and I must say that my memories of reading were around aviation from the very beginning more than around Shakespeare or anything that we had to read, although Jules Verne was very interesting, but…and Robinson Crusoe and so on, but I think that from the age of eleven…

Q: Karl May was at that time.

A: No, I didn’t get to him, somehow, that I remember. I remember most of the books by what they contained rather than by the names of the writers.

Q: You were more into adventures than classics, never mind Shakespeare, but not even Charles Dickens and that kind of literature.

A: That’s true, because Charles Dickens and Shakespeare and Wordsworth and all the other poets and writers were compulsory reading, so when something is compulsory at this age, it is like Latin. It became something you learned as a parrot rather than because of personal interest in the subject.

Q: I want to go back a little to your background. You said that your mother as a child was a swimmer and used to ski. You inherited somehow…you were talking about…I suppose your mother was a housewife?

A: She was a housewife, but most of the time she was…we had an au pair, if you want to call it that, because my mother in winter was busy with skiing and busy with tennis.

Q: That’s it. I tried to think about a typical Jewish mother of that class. I imagine someone who goes to the coffee shop with her friends in the morning and…something completely different to what you describe here.

A: Completely different in that sense. Completely different. And although I remember that once in a while they would play bridge with friends, but most of the time she was away, either downstairs. You could look down from the window. When I came home from school I could see here playing tennis. And in winter she always took me, from the age of six, on her trips to the Alps and so forth. I was the only child and I was usually at the end of the rope when we were climbing on skis. In those days there were not so many ski lifts, if at all, in the sense that we have them today. But my mother was not only into sports. She understood electricity. She would fix everything in the house that had to be fixed, that a person could fix.

Q: ?

A: No, she was a natural in this respect. It was also something in the family because my uncle, her brother, was a glazier. Glazier? You know, windows, picture frames and so forth. Her youngest brother, Kurto, got away to America. Went to a Zeiss technical school to learn how to repair cameras. I am speaking about…

Q: Zeiss is a very famous camera.

A: The most famous, yes. Even today they still produce optical instruments. And that saved his life in America. He got an affidavit because he was an expert in cameras. So I think it was something to do with the genes in the Kubie family. Her sister, one of her sisters was a dressmaker, and the third one was a hatter. Do you know what a hatter is? Made hats. But I am speaking about hats of that period. Each hat was a masterpiece.

Q: So all of them had good hands.

A: Yes. And I think my grandmother, who of course was very much into this, I would say, assimilation with the activities of…non-Jewish activities, I would call them. Was mainly very responsible for that because my grandfather, both my grandfathers died before I was born. I am named after the Kubie grandfather and my brother was called after the Meisl grandfather. We never met them. My grandmother was also very independent. She was left with five children when my grandfather died.

Q: Both your grandmothers lived in Brno?

A: I never knew my father’s mother, my paternal grandmother, never knew her, nor my grandfather. Neither Rene, my first cousin, who survived the concentration camps, she is as old as I am, so none of us remember or lived during the time when our paternal grandparents were alive. The only survivor was my mother’s mother who, when Hitler came to Vienna, because she was Czech, she ran away to Czechoslovakia and lived with us and went to concentration camp with my father and mother at the same time, I think on the same transport even.

Q: To concentration camp? Not to Theresienstadt?

A: Went to Theresienstadt, were three days or four days in Theresienstadt and from there they went to Auschwitz. They lived quite some time, both…as a result of my mother’s cooking capabilities, which were renowned among her friends, she ran a Russian prisoner-of-war camp kitchen near Auschwitz. Although my father spent the last…from the time we left, became…was an officer in the Czech reserves, had to go to a “kamincon”, which is a quarry, a stone quarry, where they sent all the non-Jews out and had the whole stone quarry. Near Brno. He still lived at home, but had to work fourteen hours in a stone quarry. That is prior to their being taken away to Terezin.

Q: You had four uncles and aunts from your father’s side and three from…no.

A: Five.

Q: Four from your mother’s side and three from your father’s side.

A: Yes.

Q: All of them were in Brno.

A: No. My mother’s family, as I said, my grandfather, Hugo Kubie, moved to Vienna to run a bank most probably at the turn of the century because my mother was born – she is the oldest – she was born in 1901 and her youngest brother, Kurt, who died only recently, was born in 1919, so she was eighteen when he was born.

Q: What was your mother’s name?

A: Erna. Ernoschka. Erna in German, and Ernoschka …And that’s why my daughter Evie, we called her Orna. We just used the same letters. To answer your question – my father’s brothers, one was killed during the war, World War I. His youngest brother was very badly injured during an artillery exchange between the Russian front and the Austrian front. And he was on the Austrian side and my father was on the Russian side, on the same front. My father being in the Czech Legion, which were prisoners or war which the Russians took and they formed the first Czechoslovak legion that fought against the Habsburg army. And he was badly injured and was in hospital till 1936. He only died in 1936, most probably from bed sores. So the only two that were alive when Hitler came were my Uncle Walter, who is Renee’s father, who didn’t survive concentration camp, and my father, Paul. That’s on my father’s side. On my mother’s side there were five children and all of them except my mother got out of Vienna on the way to the United States, which was sort of the direction that the family…

Q: So as a child you didn’t really know them.

A: I knew all my…I knew Uncle Bruno, who died in hospital, in the military hospital in Brno. We visited him every Sunday.

Q: He was there for like eighteen years?

A: 1918. Eighteen years in hospital. Yes. I knew him very well, and we went to visit him with my father and my brother nearly every Sunday. So I knew him, and of course I knew Uncle Walter, who was my father’s brother, younger brother, who was a cantor, a very famous cantor. He was also a musician in the sense that he played the piano very well. That kept him alive till the very end of the war. In Terezin he was part of the orchestra which played for the Red Cross and so forth. So that’s on my father’s side. On my mother’s side, they all went to the United States through England and so forth.

Q: So you didn’t really meet them until after the war?

A: I met them…no, no. First of all, Brno from Vienna is one and half hours, at the most, by car, if you don’t get held up on the border. And we regularly went to see my grandmother and I knew my uncles and aunts in Vienna very, very well. In fact, Kurt, my youngest uncle, my mother’s brother, was very much into skiing and very often came with us. And because he was the youngest, so he was closest to us. And he only died about four or five years ago in the United States. Maybe it’s not even that long. So I knew them very well. And until the very day before they left – most of them left via Czechoslovakia to go to England to go to the United States.

Q: But your daily connection, I suppose, was with your father’s brothers…(?).

A: That’s right. And not only that. I was born in the same house. We lived on the third floor at number 15 “Legionarska”, which today has a different name, which is the street named after the legionnaires, which my father was on of, at number 15. And Uncle Walter lived on the second floor. And a very famous Czech family by the name of Plachek lived on the ground floor. By the way, Plachek is the same family that one of his nephews, Joe Plachek Alon, was with us during the war and was murdered in Washington. He was a colonel, an air attaché for the State of Israel. So we were born in the same house. In those days they were not sent to hospital. We were born in the same house – one floor separated us – so we were very close to Uncle Walter, although he was a cantor in a different synagogue. He was a cantor in a big synagogue and we went to another synagogue.

Q: How come?

A: Because he was so good, so he got a position in a synagogue which was further away than the synagogue which was, like, maybe five hundred meters from our house. And he was probably on the limiting distance that you are allowed to walk on the “shabbos”. So we were close in the sense that…we were closer of course to our cousin who also had a brother who unfortunately passed away just before the beginning, before the Germans came. My cousin, Renee, who is one month older exactly, went to the same school, Czech schools. We belonged to the part of the Jewish community which spoke Czech and sent all the children to Czech schools. My father was a very big, from the establishment of the State of Czechoslovakia, from the republic, he felt a part of it. Having been a legionnaire, he felt very much a part. Not only because of the Meisl family history, but especially because of his own experience fighting against the Habsburgs.

Q: So you were definitely Czech patriots?

A: Definitely, Very much so. To the extent that I would say that before the war, the Czech Jewish community, which was most probably…historians know more than what I remember, but I would say was split fifty-fifty. The Czechs were considered a slightly lower level of culture than the Czech Jews who spoke German and went to German schools. In Brno because of our first president Masaryk, we had a university both in Czech and in German. We had Czech schools, German schools, and we in fact had a Jewish high school.

Q: Due to the fact that…you were completely Czech patriots. There was in Czechoslovakia at that time, during the ‘30s, for instance, there was a constant survey that you had to…

A: A report.

Q: To report and to declare your…

A: Declare is the word, yes. Nationality.

Q: Nationality and religion.

A: Three things.

Q: Do you know what your parents wrote there?

A: Yes. I have the documents somewhere in fact. Only recently I received similar documents which we received from the Carpathorussian, where my wife Martha was born, we received, from the 1930’s, a census, the same document. And it declares three very interesting…apart from the name and the address and so forth, the age and when they were married and so forth, it declares race, religion and nationality. Three things. So as race my father wrote “Hebrew”, as religion, “Jewish”, and as nationality, “Czech”. And exactly the same thing with my wife’s family. They had the same declaration.

Q: And let’s say that something like, I think, fifty percent of the Jews wrote religion “Jewish” and nationality “Jewish”.

A: Could be. There were a lot of Jews who wrote “Besvesnanyi” (sp?), atheists. In other words, without religion. A lot of the Jews, especially those…

Q: There were Jews without religion?

A: Yes, wrote “Besvesnanyi”. In other words, it was a time…Czechoslovakia was probably – I am speaking from what I read more than…maybe from what I read and what I experienced at school. We went to Czech schools, so we were perhaps three Jewish boys in a class of thirty, whereas most probably in the German schools of the same level – I am speaking about elementary schools – the percentage of Jewish children was higher.

Could you repeat that question because I sort of got off on a…

Q: We were talking about those Jews who said that without religion.

A: I think it goes back, I think this movement started mainly when the Czech Jewish community realized that anti-Semitism was spreading into Czechoslovakia, where it was at very low level, starting with that. That there was discretion in…there was a movement in Czechoslovakia against German-speaking people, especially...

Q: I suppose they were very strong in Prague.

A: Stronger in Prague than, of course, in the Sudetenlands, where it was not possible, but I would say that in Bohemia and Moravia – Moravia maybe a little less, in Brno, but around in the countryside it was unacceptable to speak German, A) because of the influence of Vienna, of Austria, was closer to Moravia than to Bohemia, and there were more anti…in fact, a very interesting point. I remember very clearly a teacher by the name of Sanka – that was his name – from class one to class three, the first three classes. He used to walk in and the class had to get up and pray. Everybody jointly prayed to one god, prayed to one god, who “may He look after our parents, take care of our parents, protect our country from the Germans and Hungarians”. That was the morning prayer. Very short, but everybody could pray, however it was, because even the children who came, may have come from German-speaking families who sent them to Czech schools, just like in my wife’s family – they spoke Hungarian, but they sent the children to Czech schools – you had this situation. So a combination of a movement against German-speaking people generally. The beginning of the spreading of anti-Semitism even before Hitler. The coming of Hitler, I would say, that if there was a census, which I don’t know, maybe you know, after 1930, I would say that the census, if there was one, let’s say 1935 or something like that, there would have been more “Besvesnanyi” or atheists or without religion. It was more to say “without belief”, without belief, rather than saying…Basically it is an atheist, but the exact translation is “I do not believe in the religion”. That’s basically what they were saying. And I would say that most of these Jews that registered in such way, which I know from after the war, were considered nearly as good as those that registered as Christian or whatever, because quite a number of Jews, especially children, many of them who came to England with us were actually baptized since some people, like my mother, realized already, when she read “Mein Kampf”, that this was a possibility.

Q: So you are not talking about a kind of denial of Judaism, but it was a practical attitude. The circumstances, the situation, and people wrote it in order maybe to be more safe.

A: That’s right. Absolutely. It was definitely, as opposed to…by the way, you could, in Czechoslovakia – I don’t know. You most probably know this already. – You could register as a Ukrainian, as a German, as an Austrian. When you said nationality, although you had a Czech passport, you could claim different kinds of…which was part of President Masaryk’s attitude towards the minorities, which were very liberal in that sense. The country was most probably the most liberal in Europe in that sense.

Q: I am jumping a little now to ’36, but as such Czech patriots, I suppose that the Olympic Games in ’36 in Berlin, with Emil Zatopek and everything around him for you was a big deal.

A: First of all, just a slight correction. Emil Zatopek wasn’t in 1936 yet. No, it’s okay. But I remember the Olympics and I remember the issue that Hitler made of Owens, Jessie Owens winning the 100 m race and that there were very few Jews who were allowed to participate. There were a few from Hungary and so forth because of their high position in swordsmanship and so forth.

Q: So correct me. When was Emil Zatopek?

A: I think after the war. After World War II he became famous. He was an officer in the Czech army and I think his marathon and the 10,000 meters and 5000 meters are after the war Olympics. I would say most probably, if there were Olympics in 1948? I don’t know which year. ‘48? ’52?

Q: Yes, ’52 was Finland and ’48…(?)

A: Anyhow.

Q: But anyhow, you were Czech patriots and you didn’t really want the Germans to win.

A: Not only didn’t want to win. My father was called up before the Sudeten issue, was called up and he wasn’t at home for three or four months. He served in a unit which was far away in those days, in Ushorod, which is the capital of Carpathorussia. I would say my father…there was a big issue for many years. I would say, from the age of six that I remember, that I could remember, the discussion between my mother and father, my mother having read “Mein Kampf”, and my father had read it too. My father called it, considered him a madman. That if he wanted to clear Europe of Jews, he would have to clear all the Czechs, because he was more Czech – historically, the Meisl family – than most of the Czechs that were around. So his attitude was that it was a crazy scheme, that he would never succeed. And my mother, knowing the anti-Semitism which always existed in Vienna and being a sportswomen, meeting people who were…I remember always that, as you mentioned at the beginning, the big surprise among the other teachers and the skiers and the tennis players, that she was Jewish. She believed that Hitler would do, would try and do whatever he said he was going to do. So our eyes were not in the direction of Palestine in those days. Our eyes were, from her point of view, was the United States.

Q: No kind of Zionism at that time?

A: Absolutely not. There was a lot of Zionism. Not in our family. There was Zionism in Brno. In fact, we were sent to “Maccabi HaTzair” and “Blauweiss” and all sorts of Jewish organizations, apart from “Sokol”, which was…

Q: What do you “we were sent to”?

A: We were, as children…

Q: It wasn’t your decision?

A: Not as six, seven, eight, nine, ten years old, to go to…

Q: “Maccabi HaTzair” I can understand. Sport, okay. “Blauweiss” is a youth movement.

A: Yes, but not in the sense that it was Zionist, but in the sense that they had a very good gym for exercising. It had nothing to do with Zionism.

Q: So although you were not a Zionist family, you were active in youth movements, but connected to sport. Did you have anything to do with, you know, talking about “Eretz Yisrael” and stuff like that? Were you interested in that?

A: First of all, everyone knew of Palestine, of the collection boxes which existed already at that time.

Q: The blue box of “Keren Kayemet”?

A: Yes, I think so. Yes, I think I saw them on a number of occasions in certain homes. I know that some…the boy who sat next to me, whose name was Zussman, a Jewish boy. There were two other Jewish boys, Jerezman (sp?) and Zussman, who eventually came to Israel in 1939 on a certificate with his family, and lived in Tzahala at the end, under the name of Mitkin. I know that his family were Zionists and we sometimes had discussions that they wanted to go to Palestine and in our home, they spoke of the United States and America and so forth. And Jerezman, who was the third one, who never came back from Auschwitz, I know that he also was for the United States, America. I don’t think they spoke of England at all. This wasn’t a consideration at all. It was either America or Palestine. Those were the two things. Those organizations we went to not because of what the children’s or what the parents’ movement connection was, but rather to where it was. Could we go there alone, at the age of eight, nine, ten? Could we walk there alone? Was it close enough? We didn’t have to take the tram or anything like that. And that it was supportive of the sports that we were…both tennis…So it was basically athletics.

Q: And it was Jewish.

A: And it was Jewish, of course. Jewish and Czech, in that sense.

Q: What was your first language?

A: Czech. Czech from the very beginning. It was drummed into us that every language that you knew – this I remember from both my parents – every language that you knew gave you an outlook into another culture and every culture was considered some sort of an additional education, which was considered important. So German was my mother’s mother tongue, although she spoke good Czech.

Q: Yiddish not at all?

A: I never heard of the language until I did get to England.

Q: To England?

A: Till I got to England. 1939 was the first time, and I thought it was somebody speaking some sort of Viennese dialect because in Vienna it was difficult for me to understand the Viennese dialect as opposed to the German. We never went to German classes. The German I learned was from my mother basically. My mother and father spoke only Czech at home. We had a Czech au pair. We had Czech friends.

Q: And when your parents wanted you not to understand? What language did they speak? Or they just sent you out of the room?

A: Or they went out. I don’t remember a situation which existed in my home because my wife and I speak Czech to this day, and the only one who understood and didn’t let us know that she understood was Evie, who is the oldest one. I know that from the age of eight I went to something equivalent to a Berlitz school to learn French, although it wasn’t taken up at school yet.

Q: You didn’t study at school French?

A: No. Not at the age of eight.

Q: I know that basically in Czechoslovakia they studied four languages at the same time – Czech, German, French and English.

A: Yes. Yes, okay. So we had a Hebrew teacher. His name was Merrill. And he, in addition to my father, who every Friday, we had a lesson in Hebrew. I am speaking about reading Hebrew, not necessarily understanding…

Q: You are talking about Hebrew as “lashon kodesh” or Hebrew as a…?

A: “Lashon kodesh”. No, “lashon kodesh”. In order to be able to follow the services.

Q: For the sake of prayers.

A: Not to understand the prayers. To read them. Not to understand them. And I think that all the prayer books were both in Czech and Hebrew. Now, French I started either at the age of seven or eight, out of school. Elementary school had not other…the Czech elementary school, (?) – which was the name of the school. 28th of October, which is the day of independence of Czechoslovakia. – did not have a language, did not teach another language except that when they had religious classes, the Catholics went to the padre, we went to a rabbi, who I remember, and the Greek Orthodox went to their…and the Protestants went. There was at least a division into…we were the smallest group. We were three. Others were seven, and so forth. We split up for that one hour. In the same school, but we split up. So I took French. My mother sent me, my parents sent me – sent me, not my brother – sent me to French, and in 1938, one year before we left, when my grandmother arrived, they sent me…they brought in an English teacher to give me very intensive English classes. That was from the day that my father agreed that we should go to England. When did he agree? Not before 1938, before my grandmother arrived. (end of side)

Q: …Jewish school?

A: There was not a Jewish elementary school in Brno. There was a very large Jewish “gymnasium”. It was called “Gidarna”, and it was very famous for the noise that heard in the breaks, in the whole street. That’s what it was famous for. All the Czechs spoke that the loudest school was the Jewish school, because when the bell rang, the noise was terrific, in the break.

Q: You’re talking about boys.

A: We’re talking about the boys’ and girls’ school. Gymnasium.

Q: It was mixed?

A: Yes. Gymnasium in Czechoslovakia was co-educational.

Q: We’re talking about an elementary school that is four years?

A: Five.

Q: It depends if you are a good student or not. It you are a good student, it is four years and then you are going to the gymnasium, and if you are not that good, you continue the fifth grade and then go to the gymnasium.

A: The system which was in Brno – I don’t know about Prague. I think it was the same – it was five years, from the age of…The classes were called one, two, three, four, five. At the end of five you could jump. You could go from third to fifth if you were a brilliant student, and you could also stay behind. Okay? But that was five years. At the age of ten, if you reached the age of ten, you went to a gymnasium, which was eight years. There was nothing in between. There was a lower class school, not a gymnasium, which was called (?), and there was an equivalent technical school, which was called (?). And they finished, the (?), you could finish the school at the age of sixteen and go into a profession without matriculation. “Matura”, yes. So basically I left…I left at the end of the five years. I think my brother left at the end of three years. In other words, we left Czechoslovakia on the 28th of July, 1939, which was in the middle of the summer holiday, so we already knew what school we went to. We already met in class. Usually the same class went to the same school, most of them. And it was a school also that I came back to after the war.

Q: Did you feel any anti-Semitism as a child?

A: I felt…I knew of anti-Semitism because of the discussions that were going on between my parents, and they were open discussions and we listened. We listened. I would say that I knew more of anti-Semitism in the terms of anti-German Jewish movement, anti-German-speaking Jewish movement, in that sense, rather than the question of religion. In other words, the Czechs objected to the fact that now that we had a republic, like the Israelis objected to people speaking Hungarian when we came to Israel. There was definitely this movement, and we were very, very proud to go to Czech school because it was transmitted to us from our father and the surroundings. And I never felt that when the class split up, it was very natural for the Catholics to go with the padre, for the Protestants to go with their priest, and for us to go with the…

Q: You don’t remember any anti-Semitic incidents as a child?

A: Absolutely not. The only time, the first time we heard of anti-Semitic incidents was because my grandmother coming from Vienna, telling us what happened in Austria, my Uncle Kurt, and the fact, I would say, the opposite. Even in Vienna, my great-uncle, that is my grandfather’s brother, Berthold, was imprisoned, went to concentration camp in Austria and was released when he got his certificate to go to settle. He was a social democrat, which was considered anti-German, anti-Nazism. And he was released. The moment he got his certificate he came to Palestine, so there was a branch of the family – to make a slight correction to what I said before – a branch of the family, a cousin of my mother, first cousin of my mother, married a German Jew from Bamberg, which is across the border from Bohemia, not very far. On the other side of the border. And he was a Zionist and she and her brother came to Israel in 1933. As soon as Hitler came, they came in…(pause in tape).

I’m making a correction from what I said before when you asked about Palestine. My mother’s first cousin, Trude Krieger – she married a German Jew from Bamberg, and they moved from Bamberg, together with her brother. They came to Israel in 1933, and stayed in Israel. They were obviously Zionists and they stayed in Israel till 1957, when they went to the United States because the situation here was “tzena” and so forth, and the relatives were in the United States, so they went to the United States. So that was one part. And the other part was my grandfather’s – Hugo Kubie, whom I didn’t know – his brother, Berthold, who was a glazier, who was imprisoned for being a social democrat in Dachau. The way they got him out was that he got a certificate to come to – they called it a “certificate” – to come to Palestine. And he was released by the Germans, by the Nazis and came to Israel, to Palestine in 1938.

Q: But that doesn’t say anything about Zionism because at that time, when someone was in Dachau and the only way to pull him out of there was to show that he has somewhere to go outside the state, even Palestine was an option.

A: Absolutely true, absolutely. When you put it that way, there is no question about it. I don’t think there was…most probably the Mannheims from Bamberg, that he was definitely a Zionist because he trained in a profession. He was an engineer and he took up air conditioning because they told him this was the future in Palestine. I think that he definitely – and he belonged to the youth movement. He was definitely…which influenced his wife and most probably my mother’s cousin as well. They still have quite a big family.

Q: But in your family they didn’t talk about this family as lunatics or something like that?

A: Oh no. In fact, I didn’t know about them until accidentally I went to…when I came to Israel in 1949, one of my first trying to look up, the only person that I knew was in Israel was Uncle Berthold, who was in Dachau. And we knew that he lived somewhere around No. 130 Ben Yehuda Street in Tel Aviv. So in 1949, Joe Plachek and myself, we were on the way. We were stationed in Sde Dov as pilots. We lived in Jaffa, and we used to walk every day. And on that day we walked through Ben Yehuda because Sde Dov was at the end of Ben Yehuda. We walked and I decided to look up and we went from…and the first house we went into, which looked like a house that had apartments, we went in there and we knocked on the downstairs door and I said, “Would you know if as certain Berthold Kubie lives in this house? Lives here”. And she said, “Yes.” She said to me, “Yes, Hugo.” She said to me, “Uncle Berthold lives on the third floor.” She was Trude Krieger, who had met me as my mother’s first cousin in Vienna, during our visits to Vienna. I didn’t remember her, but she recognized me and that’s how I found out that they were in Israel. I had no idea, except for Uncle Berthold.

Q: You were talking about a nice and peaceful life in Czechoslovakia in ’38. Am I right?

A: I would say that…I would describe the period until 1938 as the calmest and most natural period in my life, although in the background there was this discussion between my mother and father about Hitler. And as I said before, the coming of my grandmother, and then “Kristallnacht”, much later of course, when we knew, everybody knew about what was happening to the synagogues, which is a very vivid memory. And I would say that the reason for this calm life was my father’s, or my parent’s, decision to assimilate with the Czechs. And never, until I came to Israel, was the question of Jewish race mentioned. There was no such a thing as Jewish race for us. It was a religion, and racially we were Czechs, not only nationally.

Q: And I understand that you were a religious family?

A: Religious in the sense that we did not adhere to “kashrut” because my mother objected to “kashrut”.

Q: Religious, but you don’t keep “kashrut”?

A: Religious in the sense that we had Friday night. Every Friday night we prayed. It didn’t matter who came for Friday night dinner, my mother prepared “gefilte” fish and all the normal, special dishes. From making bread – se made her own “challah”.

Q: We can say that you were traditional.

A: Yes. But on High Holidays we would spend the whole day in the synagogue – no question about it from that point of view.

Q: You didn’t go with your father to synagogue every Friday?

A: No, only Saturdays. When there was something which was on my mother’s sports agenda, which was not more important. But on big holidays there were no question about it. As far as dress was concerned, going to synagogue, spending the whole day there. Both my mother and father went. And, of course, Walter, my cousin’s father and mother, they were definitely religious in the sense that they also kept a kosher home. Okay?

Q: If we are talking about Saturday – if your mother had, let’s say, a ski activity on that day, you went with her instead of going to synagogue with your father?

A: There were very few instances. Brno is not very hilly, so when I was very, very small, I can’t tell you. If there was any skiing it was on Sunday and not on Saturday. Okay? Saturday was a working day. My father’s and my uncle’s stores did not close on Saturday, but the managers were in the stores when they went to synagogue on Saturday. So Saturday we would go to synagogue. I cannot remember any type of competition because Sunday was the day for sports.

Q: Did you like going with your father to the synagogue?

A: Yes, in the sense that…

Q: Maybe you met your friends there?

A: Not so much my friends because they went to a different synagogue. Both Zussman went to a different and (?) went to a…the only were the Tomashof boys, the three boys who came to England with us. One is still alive – Willie Tomashof, who was a judge, a retired judge in Israel. Aaron Tomashof was, until he retired, a judge in Beer Sheva. And his older brother, Felix, was killed during the war in Jerusalem, during the War of Independence, and his youngest brother, Irwin Tomashof – they all came from the same street as us. They were not related, but we came to England, the five of us came to England on the same day, on the same transport, and we were together till 1943. And Irwin died in Chicago. He was a very prominent lawyer who, from Israel, went to study in Chicago and stayed in Chicago, became a professor and very prominent lawyer at one of the largest legal companies.

Q: So why did you like to go to synagogue?

A: I think that it was one way of…it’s a good question because I have never considered it, but I would say it had something to do with the fact that on Friday we sat for at least two hours with our father over reading the “siddur”, learning how to read, and here was an opportunity to listen to it and to participate, although we were far too young to participate. We were not “bar mitzvah” yet.

Q: Both of you went with your father?

A: Yes. Yes.

Q: Maybe today we would call it “quality time” with your father.

A: Yes, because we had little time with my father because my father was not a sportsman. He liked to ramble and walk. I would like to bring in a very interesting point here, which I forgot all about as we were talking. Because we knew we had an older brother, we were, as soon as we understood what was going on, we wanted out mother to have another brother. And finally, I think I was seven or eight when my parents decided to adopt. Until then we were expecting the stork to bring us, and we used to put food into the double window, believe it or not. And in Brno, in the Jewish orphanage in Brno there were only Catholic children. In other words, the orphanage was kept open because they didn’t have Jewish children. So we adopted a Catholic boy by the name of Peter. He became Peter Meisl. And he was also…he was also in Winton’s “Kindertransport” list to go to England, but a month, approximately a month – I think it must have been April – the Gestapo arrived at our home when we were at home. It must have been either a Sunday or...I remember being at home and a man coming in a black, not leather, I think it some sort of a rubber coat. German. Very gruff to my parents and instructed him to pack all his things, all his toys, and took him away because there is no…I think my mother or father asked what was going on and he said, “No Christian child can be brought up in a Jewish family.” And we never saw him again. It’s a long story. Many years later, a few years ago, through searches which we made, through telephone books and so forth, we finally got to a Meisl family, non-Jewish Meisl family who suspected that their grandfather, by the name of Peter, came from an orphanage. But he wasn’t alive anymore. I am in contact with this family.

Q: How old was he?

A: He was between us. He was nine when I was ten and when my brother was eight, so he was right in the middle between us. And as far as a Jewish education was concerned, he was allowed to come with us to the synagogue. We were not allowed, on Sunday morning he would go to church and we would wait for him outside. We were not allowed during the service to go in. And I remember that he had a “kapele” and he was very glad to come in. My father’s and my mother’s attitude was, which many years later people spoke about it, was that they decided until the age of eighteen they would allow him then to choose – or maybe twenty-one, I don’t know. Somehow the number eighteen comes to mind. So we had…

Q: It was kind of more like a foster family.

A: He was fully adopted.

Q: Officially?

A: Officially. His name became Meisl. Fully adopted. Oh yes.

Q: And you didn’t have many fights with him?

A: No. We didn’t have many fights because it was explained to us at home the terrible situation that he had no parents. I don’t even know whether he was an orphan from childbirth, from a prostitute, or from a…we know nothing of his background. And the family which we found, who claimed, who think that their father came from a Brno orphanage, who was the right age and so forth, they also knew nothing of his background, his family, or something like that.

Q: So he was with you something like two years?

A: Three. Three years. Till 1939. I think from 1937 till 1939.

Q: Which holiday did you like best at home?

A: I think Chanukah. A) Because of presents. Secondly because it was a big thing with the lights, with the candles and so forth.

Q: Did you used to put a “chanukiah” next to the window?

A: Yes. Yes. Yes. And most probably “Seder Pesach”. My father led the service to the extent that I knew how to lead the service when I came to London. It was a surprise to everybody concerned that I could…I remember most of it by heart to this day. Especially after the meal. “Rabotei, nevorech l’Shem….” and so forth. The prayers after the meal and so forth.

Q: Did you know any “chareidi” Jews as a child?

A: No. I know. No, I didn’t know they existed. I didn’t know that there was such a thing as “payes”. The first time I met a very orthodox Jew was also a very unusual situation. It was during the war. The year was 1940, the “Blitz” is on and we are in Bedford and we had organized a youth synagogue, which was the first time in the world that children under the age of sixteen, seventeen organized the synagogue only for children, and we used to invite Jews who came in from London over the weekend. And among the Jews was a short, very much red-headed person. We knew nothing of his profession. It wouldn’t occur to us to ask. And he used to come to the synagogue on Saturday for prayers, would put a “kapele” on. In the streets he would walk around without a head cover. And he prayed with us. And one day he said to me, “I have to go tomorrow morning, on Sunday, back to London and I know that you have a day off and you have been such a…very good in the synagogue.” He said, “I am going to go and I am going to come back on Sunday night, before the “Blitz” starts at night. You can come with me with my car, in my car, come to London,” which was for me something…I hadn’t been to London since we were evacuated. And we went to the East End, which I realized was the East End, to a street where all the houses were the same size. A very poor area. And we came to this house, stopped the car in front of the house. And the houses were very small – one door, one window and two windows above the door. Each house was exactly the same. He opened the door and I walked in and I saw a filthy, smelly butcher’s shop. And he opened the window, opened the door, because it had been closed most probably for two or three days or something like that. On the walls were hanging chickens, you know, on hooks. Chickens – that I remember very clearly. Some of them of them were clean and some of them were still with feathers on. He went into the next room and he came out with “payes”, with a big “yarmulke”, white “yarmulke”, and a very dirty green, from butcher’s…He was a “shochat” and a butcher. And then I realized that he belonged to this…I sat there in the scullery and saw these, for the first time, with knickerbockers and white stockings and big so and so, come to buy. And this was the first time…and then I realized this – was some sort of a theatre of this man, who came to Bedford, who didn’t let the non-Jews know that he was Jewish. He hid his “payes” in his hair, didn’t wear a hat. He drove without a hat to London. Only wore the “yarmulke” in the synagogue. And there he lived and was a “shochat”, which was considered to be…and his clients were the most religious people. So from that occurrence, which was the first time I met this group of people, I have had some sort of aversion to this part of Judaism.

Q: In Brno did you have Jewish and non-Jewish friends? Was there any difference?

A: Our families had both Jewish and non-Jewish friends. In fact, we were very closely tied to a non-Jewish family whose…my father served in the army during World War I with a man whose name was Sekal. His son, Tonda Sekal – and they lived near the church in Brno – they decided together, Tonda Sekal’s father and my father decided to build a villa outside of town. A villa to spend the summer and to spend the weekends. And during the construction of this villa in the ‘30s, which I have even pictures of, because I was looking up some old pictures, was a very modern building with three floors for two families, or two and a half families. And Sekal died before the house was finished, and my father helped his widow, “Babichka Sekalova”, the grandmother, who was to us like a grandmother, because we were lacking one grandmother, so there was room for another one. Tonda was co-teacher in tennis and co-teacher in skiing with my mother. So we were very, very close to them. And even I would say that as far as sports were concerned, I spent more time with Tonda Sekal and my mother than when my mother and father decided to go on a ramble together and take us along. So the family, his brother, his sister – the whole Sekal family were extremely close to us, to the extent that when the Germans came and took my parents to Terezin, that same night Tonda, with his brother and sister, came with a truck and during the night – they knew that the Germans would take, confiscate all the so and so – came in, took all the clothing and all the all the furniture, everything that was in that large apartment, five-room apartment, and moved it to the villa and buried it in the grounds in the a sort of a basement, which they built especially for it, and we opened it when we came back after the war. And we lived there for a short time because somebody else had taken over, Jewish people had taken over our apartment in town. So we were very close friends. Apart from that, there were friends, Czech friends, Czech Jewish friends, who either played bridge or went skiing with my mother – those were the two groups.

Q: But yet, as I understand, your best friends at that time were Jewish. Zussman and the other one.

A: Ah, at school. Yes, definitely. Yuzzie (sp?) was my best friend and Zussman, although I sat next to him, was not as good a friend. He was a good enough friend to, after the war, to write me from Palestine and knew of my father’s stamp collection, to ask for certain stamps, which I sent to him from Czechoslovakia after the war. But Yuzzieman was really my closest friend, although there were a least two others that I was as close to – a boy by the name of Voharalik. They had a sports shop, so we had a double connection. A. My father was a fan of motor racing. That was what he took us to watch. And I am speaking of Formula I.

Q: Couch sport, that you don’t participate.

A: That’s right. You watch. That’s right. That’s exactly true. And in Brno was a famous equivalent to Formula I racing, called the (?). There is a new one there now, but at that time, all the famous drivers, Novolari, Rosenmeyer, Karacholo, I remember them as if it was yesterday, watching. I don’t know how we got to this, but anyhow, Voharalik’s father had the largest sports store in town and Kuhn, who lived behind us, a street block, was also in the same class – his father ran one of the largest restaurants nearby.

Q: But Kuhn is a Jewish name.

A: No. It’s K-U-H-N. It’s definitely…

Q: It’s not coming from “Cohen”.

A: No. Definitely not. And Voharalik – definitely not. Neither of them I succeeded after, when I got back, neither of them I succeeded in meeting after the war, which is…I can’t remember why, but either they moved from Brno, which was one of the reasons most probably. And Voharalik somehow either died during the war or something. Something happened to him.

Q: So after a nice, peaceful childhood, we get into ’38. First we are talking about August ’38 and the Germans took or seized, or whatever you will call it, the Sudetenland. As a child of ten years old, was it significant for you? Did you understand anything. Did you listen to the discussions at home?

A: Not only did we…As I said to you, my father was called up, so we were very much involved in the attitude that, my father’s attitude was transmitted to us, that the Czechs, until the Sudeten, could, without any problem, hold the German army. They couldn’t come because of Sudeten. The whole business of Sudeten is the ring around Bohemia and Moravia, where you could only drive tanks through mountain passes. And all the defenses of the Czechs were in the Sudetenland, basically as if it was in France, you would take the Maginot line, or in Germany, the Siegfried line, away. It was basically, the main defense of Czechoslovakia were the mountains around Bohemia and Moravia.

Q: So as Czech patriots you believed that the Czech army was…

A: Invincible. Absolutely, absolutely. Especially because of the Czech air force, which was considered to have better aircraft than the Messerschmitt was at that time. Basically the army was based on the legionnaires who came from Russia, who beat the Austrians and so forth, so there should be no reason why they should…So it was a terrible issue at home, the fact…the Munich disaster, okay? And the let-down by the British, by the English, mainly the English, of giving away, and the French agreeing…when I, already as a boy of eight, nine, ten, knew of the agreements that Czechoslovakia had with Romania, Poland, England and France, which was called the (?), and the (?), which was without Romania, that they should come to help Czechoslovakia.

Q: But at the age of ten, were you interested in those pacts? Who is the ally of who, and…?

A: Very much so. This was discussed, as I said, because, most probably more than…no, I would say that the attitude at the school. The school, if you remember I mentioned, was called (?), of the 28th of October, which was 1918, was the day of independence. Was in the square of that date the teachers – I remember a teacher by the name of Trabnichek, who was a very good friend of the family as well. It was an atmosphere of ability. We were convinced that until the Sudeten, until Munich, that the Germans could not possibly succeed in attacking, and would not take the risk of attacking Czechoslovakia.

Q: By the way, you were talking about your school. Did you like going to school? Were you a good student?

A: I was a very good student. I liked going to school. I was very much in love with one of the girls, which went to the girls’, which was on the second floor. We were on the, the boys were on the first floor, the girls on the second floor. A classmate of Renee, my cousin. I was very much in love with, as a boy. We used to walk on the other side of the road. We wouldn’t go with them, but Renee went with her on one side of the road and we would walk parallel and so forth. Her name was Milada Sikrova. And after the war, when I came back from England, I was still in uniform as a cadet and I went to look. I knew where she lived and I went to the apartment. I knocked on the door and a lady opened the door, was taller than me, very fat. And I said, “Does Milada Sikrova live here?” And she said, “I am Milada Sikrova.” And that was the end of my love affair.

Going back to a question which you mentioned. When the communists, in 1989, as soon as we could in 1990, I went back with Marta and the children. We went to Brno. And we had a reunion of thirty-two children, twenty-eight from thirty – I have a list here – from the school that we graduated in 1939 and after the war we went and did the Czech matric, because the “matura”, the English matric, which I had, was not recognized was not good enough for the Czechs. So we met in 1990 with everybody except for two pupils, one who ran away to Australia and one, I think, was in America somewhere. With all of them I made an evening dinner party and I was considered just like the Australian by these Czechs who were all communists and very high positions – doctors, lawyers. Everybody had a super profession. We were considered as traitors. But we were extremely good friends, so this friendship was renewed. Overnight they all became non-communists. You understand? But they were all such good friends from the time of the elementary school.

At the same meeting in 1990 was a very interesting episode. There were two episodes which were very interesting as far as my life was concerned, and I am going to speak about the first one. At this meeting when we met with about twenty-eight of previous schoolmates, classmates, university mates, one of them came up to Marta and said to her, when I introduced her and said that she is from “Potcarpatskarus”, he said, “Well, Hugo doesn’t know this, but I am also basically Jewish. My mother was born in ‘Potcarpatskarus’”, and so forth. So he basically belonged to that group that I mentioned to you, “Besvesnanyi”, and he grew up with us and of course never participated in anything Jewish, but he admitted in 1990 that he was Jewish. A most interesting issued was, we met with…when it was forty-five years, forty years I think, forty years – in 1985 we had a reunion of the Czech State Secondary School in England. I am mentioning it completely out of this, but it is very interesting. We were a hundred and twenty students at this Czech State Secondary School, which was formed basically to serve the children of those that were in the Czech army, Czech air force and so forth, or worked for the Czech government in exile. Children of those. And so we were there by accident basically, because we neither had anybody in the services nor in the government. And so we had this reunion and out of the hundred and twenty children, we did not have a “minyan”, including girls, during the war. I think we were eight Jewish boys and we had to add two Jewish girls to make up the “minyan” so that Rabbi Stransky could do the service on Saturday.

Q: So you were very modern.

A: Yes. But in 1990…

Q: Liberal.

A: Liberal. But in 1990, at the reunion…sorry, 1985. First reunion of the school. We had seventy. Seventy people came to the reunion. Five were non-Jewish, sixty-five found out that they were Jewish. In other words, they already came to England as either “Besvisnanyi”, atheists, or were baptized or Catholics or Protestants or whatever. And only after the war, when they either reunited with their parents or their parents admitted, or relatives admitted the fact that they came from Jewish families. It was something….I mean, the numbers are just mind-boggling, you know? To realize what anti-Semitism in the sense that the parents realized what they had to do with these children to the extent that I have a very good friend who was vice-president of Boeing Aircraft, who found out only after the war, a number of years after the war, that he was Jewish. And it hurt him very much that his parents didn’t tell him. You know? Anyhow, getting back to what…

Q: Now 1938. The summer after the Germans entered the Sudetenland, your father is coming home from the army, and what is going on at home?

A: Everything goes on normally. A decision is made to send us to…My grandmother arrives from Vienna. She convinces my father that there is no room for us to stay. So and so. Applications are made to go to the United States. The chances of getting an affidavit are very, very limited.

Q: Although you had first-degree relatives there.

A: Not yet. We had, yes, first-degree relatives. They were in Chicago, my uncle was in Chicago. In order to be able to give somebody an affidavit you had to have a certain income. An affidavit was basically a guarantee to take care of people. And even in those days it took a long time to get so and so. I found the applications from my Uncle Walter. Among the things that were saved by the Sekal family were family documents, letters from us to Czechoslovakia. I kept letters from my parents. So I had all the documents and so forth of the family, most of the documents.

Where was I?

Q: So there wasn’t much of a chance to go to America immediately. What was the second option?

A: The second option…no, there was no other option that was talked about, but my father’s very good friend, Alfred Tomashof, who was very much connected with…they were Zionists and the whole Tomashof were Zionists. Some of them were already in Palestine. They had connections, so I found out recently from Aharon Tomashof, the one who is still alive and is a judge, that his father knew of a London rabbi, who eventually became a very prominent rabbi in England, that he could arrange to take, to arrange for a hostel, a Jewish hostel, orthodox hostel, to take in his three boys, and he gave the address to my father. And my father wrote – I have all these letters – to the same rabbi, asking him to accept us, two boys from a good Jewish family. That’s the way it is described. Brought up in a Jewish atmosphere and so forth. And this Jewish rabbi, Mr. Rabinovitch, he answered my father with a card that I have and said, “I have arranged for your children to go to, to come to England, but I request you under no circumstances to advise other Jews in Brno that I am doing this because I don’t want all the Jews in Brno to turn to me.” So that was one. At the same time, apparently maybe in parallel, as very many Jewish families did, my father approached this organization that Nicholas Winton had set up in Prague, which was called the Children’s Refugee Committee. I have the letter somewhere. So there was a double application. Application through Nicholas Winton’s organization and this application to Rabinovitch. Anyhow, we got…am I running too fast?

Q: No, but I have a question here because you were talking about Tomashof who were Zionists, and at that time all Czechoslovakia went as few transports of illegal “aliyah” and “Aliyat Hanoar” from Prague, Bratislava to Palestine. Wasn’t that an option at that time?

A: It was not considered an option for us because of the non-Zionist or…The direction was America. Uncle Kurt was already – my mother’s brother – was already in Chicago and that was…

Q: But you said that Mr. Tomashof was Zionist and yet it wasn’t an option maybe because it was illegal. I don’t know, but…

A: I’ll tell you what. The time was running out. We are talking about the period after the Germans occupied Czechoslovakia, after the 14th of March, 1939.

Q: You were talking about the autumn of ’38.

A: We jumped. In the autumn of ’38 I have no idea…I think the letters, the decision was made only after my grandmother came from Vienna, which was in the winter of ’38.

Q: Why? She waited half a year?

A: I don’t know. No, October. Anschluss was October 1938, right? No, sorry. Beginning of ’38. Maybe it took…I can’t remember. I mean there is just no way I can remember. I can only remember that it was my grandmother who convinced, my mother’s mother, who convinced my father that the time was to get out of Czechoslovakia.

Q: And we can add a little later, in November, ’38, the Kristallnacht.

A: Okay. And we can add the fact that Winton is in Prague in December, 1938, till first week or second week in January. So whether the application to the Jewish hostel was made – I can check that in the letters – was made after the application to Rabinovitch or before, I can check in letters. But I think it was about the same time. (end of tape)

Q: Did you have an opinion about it? Did anyone ask you?

A: No. No, except the fact that I was learning English and that it was interesting. A good question was always that people look at us as somebody who suffered as a result of what happened, being removed from home. I think it was both our parents, especially our mother, tried to impress us a) that they were coming, they would follow us. Number 2, that in the meantime we would have a very good time because we would be on our own basically, without this family, without the mother and father involved. It was to be an adventure. That’s what I would call it. And it is at this point in time that I always say, and I have been trying to organize a movement for the recognition – and I am trying to establish a monument in Prague – in memory of those parents in Czechoslovakia, 690 or in that order of magnitude, maybe a thousand, who agreed to send their children to England, believing that they would be in safety. And then listening to the radio in 1939, ’40, that London, where they sent their children, is being blitzed, bombed, and eight thousand people are dying from the eight million every night, which Mr. Goebels announces on the radio, whilst the Jews in Brno were still not going even around with the “Magen David”, with the yellow star. So they went through the Holocaust twice, once for what they did with their children and secondly, what happened to them later on in Auschwitz.

Q: So before we arrive to the transport, in July, I think it was, ’39, there was another important event and this is no more Czechoslovakia, when the Germans enter in March, ’39. What was the immediate effect on you, on your family?

A: First of all, school went on as normal. I remember the prayers stopped. Trabenchek stopped the prayers in the morning where we said we should protect ourselves. I remember the day Hitler drove through Brno on his way to Prague. We were called out because it was obvious that it was going to happen in the Square of the Day of Independence of Czechoslovakia, that we were, all the schools – there were at least two gymnasiums, two high schools on the same square, there were at least two or three elementary schools. It was a very large square and surrounded by schools. And it was obvious, instructions were given to the schools to bring all the children out to see the German cavalcade with Hitler in this Mercedes, standing up there, for us to watch. And I remember very clearly that among the children were children who were wearing for the first time that we noticed it, like in Austria, leather short trousers with braces, leather braces, white socks, white socks up to your knees, and green petals (?), which was the sign of the German…this was a sort of a uniform that they were wearing, and I remember that nobody except these children – there were two or three of them in my area. And I remember when the cavalcade went by and there was still mud in the streets, that some of the boys rubbed mud onto the socks, white socks of these Germans who stood up and shouted “Heil Hitler”. But on the whole I remember complete silence except for two or three voices. It was like in a cemetery. All I can still here is the rattling of the chains of these, not tanks, but they had command cars with normal wheels in the front and tracks in the back. And I can hear the noise right now as I see them there. I was no more than what, fifty meters from him maybe, standing up with his “Heil Hitler” salute, slowly driving past on the way to Prague. So they were in Brno before.

Q: It was an open car?

A: Oh yes. An open Mercedes. He was standing up, holding in front and his hand up like this, and there were two or three other officers sitting in the car. I can see it today, happening. And then they were marching by. The first time I saw the goosestep and so forth.

Q: So you kept going to school.

A: We kept going to school.

Q: Your father still had the store?

A: Yes.

Q: And life was if…

A: The first thing that I remember that, I think it must have been sometime the end of April, May, that a German, a Czech German person came in to manage the store and they forced my father still to…

Q: (?)

A: That’s right. To run the store. And my father worked there and received wages. And I remember that my father had to pay the employees, because I remember the discussions that he had basically to send away certain employees and take other employees, most probably German, into the store. I think the same thing happened in my uncle’s store. In other words, there was somebody, some German. I know no details of it, but that I remember very clearly. And I remember that the emphasis was on us learning English. Especially myself. Rudy was too, my brother Rudy was too young, but I spent many hours. And not only did we spend a lot of hours learning, but we had many more lessons – this teacher that I mentioned, Merrill, who I never met again after the war – most probably Jewish, may have been Jewish, didn’t survive the war – came to our house to give us additional lessons, to give me additional lessons. Of the five that went to England, I was the only one that had taken English lessons. I can’t remember how we spent the holiday. Most probably most of the time we were at the Sekals outside of town. They had a swimming pool there. Most probably that’s where we spent our last summer. I know that I had never been to Prague until about four days prior to our departure on the 24th of July. I have the train tickets, so we can check the date exactly. My mother decided not to go with us to Prague. She said goodbye to us at home, and our father and Mr. Tomashof and my Uncle Siegfried took us to Prague. And we spent two or three days in Prague, looking around Prague and so forth.

Q: At the age of eleven, could you understand what does it mean to leave the family and to go to England, or were you looking only at the adventure you were going to have?

A: I wasn’t eleven yet. My birthday is on the 9th of October, so – we are talking about July – I was nearly eleven. Okay. It’s a good question. What I remember is the attempts – most probably successful – attempts at making us understand that this was going to be an adventure in a most interesting country, that we were going to be in a Jewish environment, that our parents would follow within a few months. It wasn’t a question of weeks. It was mentioned within a few months, as soon as…And then we would most probably – something like that – we would most probably go to America to follow in Uncle Kurt’s footsteps, and the other. In addition to that, my Aunt Grete, my mother’s sister, was in Wales. My mother’s first cousin, Otto Kubie, with his three boys, was in Scotland, in Glasgow, so we were going to a country where we were going to a hostel, but these very well known relatives of ours were in England, in England and Scotland. It was so arranged that they were supposed to meet us, in addition to the people or the hostel where we were going. My Aunt Greta wrote to my parents – and I have the letters – that “I went to the station. I saw the children. They were taken to such and such a place. They are okay.” She never came because she couldn’t afford the train ticket form Wales to London, but she wrote that letter. And my Uncle Otto Kubie and Aunt Ninush wrote exactly the same letter from Scotland, that they came to London and saw us and so forth, and I know from after the war that he couldn’t afford to pay, I don’t know, fifteen shillings or a pound to go from Glasgow by third-class to London and back. This was all in order that they already realized that the most worried people in this whole incident were not us. I think that the first time that I realized it wasn’t going to be so pleasant was at the railway station, where the Gestapo put us into this train and locked the train with “plumbot”, you know, with lead. There were no grown-ups on the train at all, only children. And the fact that they closed it and the fact that the way they guarded the train, perhaps that no parents should get on…The German attitude (?) – that was the attitude. I think that was the first time, in the train that what was happening…

Q: Maybe it’s not such an adventure as you thought before.

A: That’s right.

Q: Do you remember getting any instructions from your parents before you left, or any guidance?

A: Oh yes. A number. First of all, that I am the father of my brother. That I am not the older brother, but I am replacing my father in everything that is connected with from getting up in the morning, cleaning your teeth, praying in the morning, praying in the evening. By the way, I didn’t mention. We prayed every morning, we prayed every evening.

Q: And to your brother it was also obvious that you were in charge of him?

A: He didn’t like. He never liked it.

Q: You are only two years older than him.

A: That’s right, yes. He didn’t like it. He doesn’t like it to this day, because it is something…He has a trauma because he I don’t think remembers his parents. He remembers them because of the pictures, but I don’t think he remembers. He remembers the football, where we played football, but he physically doesn’t remember.

Q: Because he was…

A: Eight years old.

Q: Eight, nine years old.

A: It’s unusual, but that’s…He should remember.

Q: Not the faces, maybe.

A: That’s it. That’s what I am talking about.

Q: It fades somehow, but I am sure that he has memories.

A: He has memories. I would call them traumas because of what happened. And we lived together for a very short time in England. We stayed in the same town. I made sure we stayed in the same place through the entire war. We went to the Czech State Secondary School together, so we were together the whole period. Never was there a time that I didn’t know what was going on with him. And whether it was financial help, which I worked and he didn’t work, and clothing – everything that you could imagine I took responsibility for because – and it’s also in the letters which I have from my parents, reminding me.

Q: So that was one of the rules. What else?

A: Judaism was another, of course. And I think most probably education…

Q: Above all?

A: Yes, above all. To the disappointment of my parents, I think, when I wrote a letter just about my eleventh birthday, that I am not going to be in the professions that they expected me to be, but that I was going into aviation. The reason for that is two-fold. We never visited, during the entire period since childhood, the cemetery of my grandparents or our brother who had died, because it was some sort of a thing that children don’t go to the cemetery whilst the parents are still alive. But before leaving, our parents took us to the cemetery, to the grave of our brother and grandmother and grandfather. And the cemetery in Brno, the gate of the cemetery is opposite the starting point of the military airfield of Brno. And as we came out of the cemetery, there was this most modern Czech fighter, most probably already in the hands of the Germans, running up and the stream, the blast of the air came through the gate of the cemetery. The airport now is much further away because it…but it is near the cemetery to this day. And I was so impressed with this…Until then I had been impressed by racing cars. All of a sudden I became impressed with aviation. And secondly, I witnessed a dogfight in 1939. The bombing of our school in London during the night and coming to the school and finding a big crater in the middle of our school in London – all of this brought me to write this letter, that I wanted to go into aviation. I would have to look it up to say whether I said I wanted to be an aeronautical engineer or a pilot – I can’t remember know, but I’d have to look it up. But that’s…

Q: Your parents somehow had the thought maybe that something might…that is wrong and you won’t see each other for a very long time and that’s why you need such guidance.

A: Even for four months, which let’s say that we are speaking about a period something like less than half a year. Two things indicated that my father was going, that our parents were coming. Number 1 – I was told of a Swiss bank account which would help him to set up his business in London. We never found the money. We found the money and it was transferred to the Red Cross. Never mind. But that was one point. And the other point was my mother’s attitude, the way she said goodbye to us, as if I was going skiing with my father and so forth. And the fact that the Tomashof boys who came with us, their mother didn’t come either, so they tried their utmost to leave us with the impression that they were going to follow. The interesting point was that in December 1939, Tomashof’s father, Alfred, and his mother received a certificate to come to Palestine, and they left in December Czechoslovakia and came to Palestine in December 1939, which, if I am not mistaken, they were still not wearing the Star of David. Do you know when it started? January, February, or was it already in December. 1940.

Q: I think even ’41. I’m not sure, but I think that it was maybe ’41.

A: I know I have a work certificate from my father here, from the quarries, from the stone quarries. I have a letter from the Jewish “kehilla” to my mother, confirming that she is a professional cook, as if this letter was meant to have two purposes. One, to the Americans to get an affidavit to come to America. Number two could be, because of the date, that they were already reporting that the Jews who had professions would get better jobs in the German concentration camps. You would know more about this than I. I think it could have had a double purpose. My mother was an excellent cook. I remember – in this respect I was different to most children. I was very fond of my mother and watching her cook. I remember to this day the ingredients she used and I cook, not as well as she, but…

Q: You helped cook?

A: Yes, I used to spend a lot of time in the kitchen, for many reasons. A) My mother used to talk about sports and how to behave on the court and so forth. The manners on the tennis court were very important, that you don’t throw your racket down, and these things which happen today. And the skiing was a method…for me she realized that I was not a natural skier, that I had to ski with my head. So if you have skied, you would know the difference between skiing naturally, like some people play games naturally and other people have to think. I belong to the thinkers and not to the natural.

Q: And also you liked cooking, or you liked the time with your mother in the kitchen?

A: Oh, very much. I think both. I think I had a crush on my mother because in the eyes of all my school friends she was very unique, both from the Olympics swimming. I was very fond of swimming. I won some prizes.

Q: You say “unique”, but today we could say a “cool” mother.

A: Okay. Alright. But in those days it was unique. She had an “ex libris” from the Olympic Games. There are pictures here, which I have from her albums, which are all saved, which you could see mixing with men in sports. Everything with men all the time, from the age of eighteen or something like that. Perhaps even younger.

Q: So you arrived in England, first to London.

A: We arrived…we left from the station, where I am trying to set up a monument. I am in contact with the mayor, through the embassy. The mayor of Prague. You know, in London they established a monument in memory of the Czech “Kindertransport” at Liverpool Street Station, where all the children arrived, both German and Czech. As I feel that the parents were the heroes, not the children and not the savers, but who were real heroes were the parents. I have suggested that the children put up, together with the City of Prague, the State of Prague, put up a monument in memory of the parents. So we left Prague on the 28th of July in this train, locked up in this train, and two days later, the train arrived…it moved very slowly in daytime. It was moving more at night. We arrived in the morning of, I think, the 1st of August in Leipzig. At the railway station it was the first stop that the Germans opened the seals on the doors and we were allowed onto the platform in Leipzig, and on the platform were Jews behind trestles and tables with sandwiches and hot chocolate, with, the first time I saw them with the Star of David on their clothing. And they spoke German to us and they were from the Leipzig community and they gave us sandwiches and, for the first time, a hot drink in two or three days. Everybody received a postcard of Leipzig to send with so many words, we were told we could write so many words. They would be posted to our parents, that we had arrived in Leipzig. I have this postcard. And we got back on the train. The train was resealed and it was again opened when we crossed the border, on the border of Holland. And on the border of Holland, the German border guard or whatever it was, the train people, came into the cabin. They were very rude, very rough with us and so forth. They searched some of the rucksacks that we had. There was no checking of rucksacks in Prague. And then the Dutch people came and it was a completely new world. It was like coming back to old Czechoslovakia. They were very friendly. And the train drove all the way to the Hague, I think, or to Osten (?), I don’t know. To the port. And the railway carriages lined up with the boat. The train rails were parallel with the boat, I remember. We got out and there were some Dutch people who gave us sandwiches. This time, instead of being brown or black bread, which the sandwiches in Leipzig were, these were, for the first time, white bread, which was buttered, most probably, but it tasted like it was wet. Typical English, Dutch white bread. And I remember, that’s my memory. We were in some sort of procedure of paperwork, which I many years later realized that they took from us the falsified visas, which most of us had, and changed them for true English visas. And we got on this boat and I remember a very, very rough channel crossing, in a storm, where nearly everybody was sick except myself, in the cabin which, I think four, six children in the cabin. I remember that I had suffered from, I don’t remember when a child, from coughing. I was always under the suspicion of tuberculosis and all sorts of…and I remember for the first time that it was the first and last time that I coughed. That on the boat, somehow, maybe because of humidity, because whatever, I was cured of this cough. We arrived in the English port and I remember transferring to the train and then I remember arriving at this railway station, which was very, very different to all other railway stations – Liverpool Street Station. We were over two hundred children. There were hundreds of people on the platform. And we took our suitcases out, we put them on the platform. I think nearly everybody had a suitcase and a half, maybe two. And we sat down on these suitcases, the five of us, and we waited for somebody to come from this hostel to pick us up. Well, this was six or six thirty maybe, not later than that, in the morning. And at about ten thirty in the evening, nobody…in the meantime trains would come in and go. And on the other side of the platform was the road, which taxis were allowed to come right parallel to the platform. I don’t know what the procedure today is, but that was the procedure at some of the railway stations, that the international platforms, and some of the national platforms, had the ability to allow taxi drivers to drive in. But very late at night – it was about ten thirty. How I got to this time I don’t remember, but I keep on repeating this time – a taxi driver came up to us and asked us who we were waiting for. And I was the only English-speaking person. I said, “We are waiting for someone. We don’t who it is.” So he asked us if we were hungry and of course we hadn’t eaten anything since the night before. So he took us to a fish and chips shop in his taxi, all five of us, with our suitcases. And after the fish and chips – I had never eaten fish nor chips before in my life, the way the fish was prepared. None of us had, I don’t think. And he took us to his home in a multi-storied building – which I had never seen a building so high. It was most probably no more than six or eight stories – into his small apartment, one-room apartment, one bedroom apartment. And I remember he had a small baby and we slept on the floor, the five of us. And this non-Jewish taxi driver next day started going around with us to all possible hostels in the East End, trying to find the place where we were supposed to go. And this went on till…we never got out of the taxi. He always used to go to the door and ask, “Do you know whether you have…were you expecting two Meisl boys and three Tomashof boys?” They said, “No.” Next. And of course we slept at his house and we ate whatever he bought. We had a few shillings. And on a particular morning, it was either Friday or Saturday, we arrived at a hostel and he asked me to come with him to the door of this hostel. It must have been either the last one or there must have been a reason why. And we came to the door, he rang the doorbell, and a woman opened the door and he spoke to her and then she asked me if I had money in my pockets, or keys. And I of course had this small change, a few shillings, and the keys. So she turned around to him and I remember, “We can’t take the boy, these boys. They are not orthodox enough.” It was an orthodox hostel. Don’t remember which one because a lot of them were bombed out during the war in Whitechapel. And finally the next day – it was a Sunday morning – he decided to go to the north of London.

Q: So you drove on Shabbat and you kept keys and money in your pockets. Then you were not religious enough to stay with them.

A: That’s right. Now, what I think happened was – this is supposition. Just a guess. Worse than speculation. Of all the possibilities. We know that the person that Nicholas Winton arranged for us to go to, most probably was a surprise for his wife that he was going to bring two boys. He died during the trip, had a heart attack during the trip, and this is most probably the reason. His wife, of course, didn’t know about it. It was a surprise. The second supposition is that the people from this very orthodox hostel came to pick us up – whichever it was. There were about eleven of these, or twelve, according to the police records in London at that time – came to pick up these five boys. Either came early or late. Saw five boys. It was a Thursday. No “payes”. And in the letter it is indicated to this hostel that they would expect us to have, to be very orthodox. And they left us. This person wouldn’t pick us up, so he left us to whatever what happen. We arrived in Crinklewood at No. 71, or 72 – I don’t remember which side of the road. I remember which side of the road, but I don’t remember which number it was. Shootup Hill (?), which is the continuation of Edgeway Road in London. We arrived at a German hostel. What I mean German is, children from the “Kindertransport”, of the ten thousand children which had been brought from Austria and Germany the year before, in 1939, who were Jewish. But as far as we were concerned, they were Germans. So from letters which I have, and from a very good memory, there wasn’t a day when we didn’t have fights between the Germans and the Czechs. We were Czechs and they were Germans. The fact that they were Jews didn’t interest us at all. It didn’t occur to us that this was the issue. And my father’s and mother’s letters say, “Stop this fighting. Make sure that nobody hurts Rudy and so forth.” You know. “Stop this fighting.” Whether they mention in this letter – I would have to look up – whether they were saying, “These children are Jewish and they are in London for the same reason that you are.” We went to an English school, to the Harben School in Swiss Cottage, which was within walking distance.

Q: Not a Jewish school?

A: Not a Jewish school. An English school. Harben School. Most of the children at this hostel, the German children, went to the same school. And I remember the day we were issued gas masks, very shortly. I remember the boxes. Very similar to the ones we have here. And I remember the day we arrived at school and we were told that we were going to not be at school that day because the school was bombed during the night and all the windows were smashed. One bomb dropped in the playground, at night. So there was a big hope. For the first time I saw a bomb hole in my life. I saw them in pictures from Spain, from the war of Spain. By the way, something which has to do with the questions you asked before. We were very much involved with what was happening in Spain, and nearly every week we went to see new pictures from the war in Spain in the main newspaper. They used to stick them – there was no television. Nothing but photos which were taken from the war in Spain. And my father used to take us to see these pictures at the “Yipa” building in Brno. I remember it like yesterday.

Q: So you arrived to a new country.

A: On the 3rd of August.

Q: Although you knew a little bit of English, it wasn’t enough to go to school. You were in a very strange place. For the first time out of home. Suddenly hostility between the Germans and the Czechs. Everything was new. How did you cope with it?

A: We were five of us. Five Czechs and all these Germans. Realize we all, at least I understood German. So did the older Tomashof boys. The others didn’t know German. I had a responsibility. I realized my responsibility and I think that is the answer to how I felt and how I accepted what was going on. I think the international issue was more important than our problem. In other words, what was going to happen? Is Hitler going to invade England? The war has started. We arrived exactly one month before the war. On the 3rd of August we were finally in England. I think on the 7th of August we were in this hostel. And within one month, by the end of September – war was declared on the 3rd of September, as far as England was concerned. Warsaw was bombed on the 1st of September. The Germans declared war on Poland. Without declaration they bombed Warsaw on the 1st of September. There was an ultimatum from England and war was declared by England on the Sunday morning at eleven o’clock on the radio. War was declared on the 3rd of September. By the 3rd of October – and I am not sure about this date – some time in October the school was bombed. We went to school immediately and apparently they had been already to school for a whole year and they were already speaking pretty good English, the German boys, the Austrian-German boys. Mainly German boys.

Q: German is closer to English than Czech.

A: Oh yes. And most of them were prepared prior to coming because most of them had more time to prepare because this business of getting approval for the ten thousand German children took much longer than Winton’s six hundred and ninety. So they were at school. So to get another five non-speaking, or four, non-speaking, non-English-speaking children to this school, they were already used to this problem. And within one day or two, we had to pack everything. We got new labels and overnight we traveled by train to Bedford, all of us. The whole school. The whole Harben School. Not the hostel. The Harben School was evacuated.

Q: The English school.

A: The English school was evacuated and our labels indicated that from refugees, which we were to that day, we became evacuees, which was a completely different status. We became English as every other English boy. The word “refugee” was forgotten at that point. So we arrived at Bedford. And at Bedford a similar situation took place at the railway station. Extremely well organized. Where people, representatives of, most probably, the local community picked up two, three, one child and took them, I don’t know whether by car, by bus and so forth, from the railway station to the foster parents, whether English, refugees or whatever, to foster parents. And Rudy and I were lucky enough to come to a home where they had two or three children themselves, the daughter was older than I and the boy, I think, was Rudy’s age. And the only thing I remember is them giving us, serving us sandwiches, white bread. It was tea-time approximately.

Q: With cucumbers.

A: Yes, cucumbers. Most probably. Certainly not salmon, which was considered to be a delicacy. I mean, tinned salmon. But it became dark, and Mrs. Chancellor – that was her name. Now I remember. – said to me, “You boys go upstairs now.” And I never heard the word “upstairs”. In all my lessons, the first time I heard the word “upstairs”. I didn’t connect it to the staircase. Physically she had to show me that around the corner there in that small house, very similar to the one that later on I saw in the East End. Two small bedrooms upstairs. In one Mr. and Mrs. Chancellor slept, and in the other the five children. And no bathroom. Scullery. Anyhow. “Upstairs” was the first new English word that I learned. And next thing we went to school. And the school accepted all these evacuees. Again, we were considered refugees by the family only after we arrived because they didn’t know that they were going to get refugees, which was a problem with a lot of them. At first there was a problem, language problem. None of them spoke any other language except English. Fortunately, Bedford is a “King’s English” area. In other words, it is not like Cockney. It’s easier to understand for anybody who studied English.

Q: How do you call it? “King’s English”?

A: “King’s English”, yes. “King’s English” is the English that the queen and the king, they speak “King’s English”, and it is taught not at public schools – public meaning the better schools. It is taught at the regular schools all over England. But even “King’s English” in Newcastle has a strong…

Q: The accent makes…

A: Yes. Or in Manchester. Mancurian accent. In other words, people who are interested – and I was very interested in the language – could pick up many years later, especially after reading Bernard Shaw’s “Pygmalion”, pick up the various accents that people have in various parts of the country.

Q: You are still in Bedford, busy with what is going to be, Hitler and the invasion? Or your daily life and that was all?

A: I was under instructions to write a letter every day. And of course to make Rudy write in the same letter. The problem was postage, the cost of postage. At the beginning we received international stamps, which each stamp would cover a letter. And they were limited to the number of international stamps they could send in a letter, so there was a problem at the beginning. I can’t tell you whether…I am sure that I didn’t write every day. Not because I didn’t want to, but because there were so many other things that I had to take care of. Very often I wrote a letter and Rudy…slowly something very interesting was happening. We were finding a difficulty to keep up Czech. We were finding a difficulty in reading some of my mother’s letters, which were written in German, in order not to forget German. And English is creeping into my Czech letters, because I have them. And of course, the main issue in the letters from my parents had nothing to do with Germany, England, war, because they were being censored obviously. So the issue was what we were doing. “Tell us what you are doing from eight to nine, from nine to ten, ten to eleven.” That was the type of letters. They are extremely difficult to read today because our answers are not replies to the questions that were being asked because we were not taking the situation as seriously. We were confident, at this point in time, that England was going to win the war, whatever happens. It was not prior to the German invasion yet.

Q: You were evacuated after one bombing?

A: One what? Oh yes. We were evacuated…no, there must have been more. But after the bomb fell in Harben School…not all the schools were evacuated from London at the same time, but most probably it happened within…I am sure that London was evacuated within a month. Children. And the parents could object to evacuation. Parents.

Q: But you remember more bombs falling…?

A: No.

Q: …to a shelter or a cellar.

A: No, not at that time. Much later on. Not that this time. I was surprised, and we didn’t hear the bomb, although we were three miles away, or something like that. Between Swiss Cottage, it is at least three miles walking distance to the Harben School. We didn’t hear the bomb. We heard the sirens every night. We heard gunfire from the “ack-ack” guns. We heard more on the radio than we heard ourselves. And of course at that time Bedford was very quiet. The first bombing of Bedford came much later.

Q: In Bedford you were in the same place, with the same family…

A: For a very short time. It became quite clear that five children in one bedroom was unacceptable. So Mrs. Chancellor reported to the “ORT” evacuee organization, (?), that they could only keep one. So of course I decided, because Rudy was already acclimatized there – it must have been a month or so – I left and went to another family.

Q: Non-Jewish.

A: Never had anything with any Jewish family until much, much later, after we established a youth synagogue in Bedford. There was one Jewish family in Bedford that we knew about, and that was a World War I fighter pilot who had a similar shop, store to my parents. His name was Rose. He had a beautiful daughter who was eighteen years old. I was twelve. He used to tell us stories about fighting in biplanes in World War I. And they were orthodox and they would invite always a different Jewish boy after the synagogue for lunch on “shabbos”.

Q: So in Bedford you weren’t a refugee. You were an evacuee.

A: Absolutely. As far as the authorities were concerned, as far as school was concerned. (end of tape)

Q: So you are in Bedford and we were talking about a non-Jewish family. A little bit about your life there?

A: We arrived in Bedford. I don’t think I remember exactly how we got to Bower Street. The name of the street that I remember now was Bower Street, and what I do remember is that both the three Tomashof boys and the two of us were billeted in the same street. Whether the Tomashof boys were with the Chancellor family or we were with the Chancellor family, as I mentioned before, I am not so sure. But I know one thing. The Bower Street is on one side of the river Ouse in Bedford, and there is a park between the river and Bower Street, and we were at No. 4 Bower Street. And I know that the Tomashofs were higher up. The thing that I remember, and I think I mentioned it, that although I’d learned English, one of the first things that took place the first evening, after we had some tea, or whatever – “supper” they called it – I was told, Rudy, my brother and I, were told to go upstairs and I had never heard the word “upstairs”. Did I mention it before? Okay. So I don’t know how long we were with this family. Rudy stayed. They had their own children. Rudy stayed, and I left for another non-Jewish family, because nobody was billeted with Jewish families in Bedford because first of all, there was only one permanently living Jewish family in Bedford, by the name of Rose, whom I met much later. And I moved out and Rudy stayed with this family. The next phase that I remember, very clearly remember, for some reason or other the in-between family I don’t remember. Most probably I didn’t stay there long enough. But I do remember being sent, until they found another family, they had hostels. The organization that evacuated children from London had hostels for those that were sort of in between homes. And the hostel was at No. 1 Cardington Road, and it was run by a Mr. and Mrs. White. Mr. White was obviously an ex-schoolmaster or something of that kind, also from London. Both were from London. And they ran this hostel for boys and girls, evacuees, who had no homes at that time. And I remember he was, I would even sense that in a sense he was a cruel person. He liked to, whenever anybody did something wrong, like was out in the garden – the house was an old English home which had a large number of bedrooms, and in the back there was a garden with fruit trees, and we were not allowed to go into the garden and pick fruit. And I remember I was punished once for picking a pear or something off the tree, so it must have been about November. November 1939. And I remember being caned by him. I think it was most probably the first time that I was caned. And as a result of moving to No. 1 Cardington Road I also had to move to another school. So I had been in contact, some years later I was in contact with the first school, where most of the refugee boys from Shootup Hill from London were sent to this school which was close to Bower Street. No. 1 Cardington Road was on the other side of the river Ooze and the area was a walking distance from a new, modern school which was called “The Silver Jubilee School”. And I remember three people very clearly from that school. First of all, the headmaster was Mr. J. J. Voyce and the math master was Mr. Morgan. And one day we had either an art class or a geography class and in comes a gentleman, very well dressed, older than all the rest of the teachers, and I heard in his accent that he was not English. So when he asked our names he went from boy to boy – this was boys only. The girls’ division of “The Silver Jubilee School” was further away. When he came to me and asked me what my name was and I said, “Hugo Meisl” and he said, “Where are you from?” And I said, “From Brno, in Czechoslovakia.” And I answered him, “I understand that you are also not English.” He said, “I am from Vienna.” And he told the whole class that his name was Fritz Gross. He was actually a very famous Austrian architect and artist, and he was brought to England by the British because he was famous, most probably a year before, and this was his job, apart from architectural and artwork. So he taught art, most probably, and perhaps geography, because the European people who were engineers or architects had a much higher education, so he could have taught any subject, I’m sure. And finally, through Fritz Gross, we became very good friends. He used to invite to his home in Kempsten, where he had a home, which was about, let’s say, a good half an hour’s bus ride away from where I lived. And I used to spend Sundays sometimes with them, with his wife, and he had a daughter. From No. 1 Cardington Road, I wasn’t there for very long and they found a home at No. 131 Cardington Road, which is right at the other end of the same street. I went to the same school. At the moment I can only remember, the daughter’s name was Muriel and the son was Jack, and I can’t for the moment remember the name of the family, although many, many years later I took my daughter Evie to visit this family. They had a cocker spaniel. Jack was an ice cream salesman on a bicycle. “Stop me and buy one.” Wall’s Ice Cream. And I think she worked as…she was working as a civilian in a balloon manufacturing in the air force. Anti-aircraft balloon manufacturing facility which was at the end of Cardington Road. It was a very famous place because one of the British zeppelins was built there, called the “R100” or “R101”, I’m not sure. What I do remember is, when I visited with Evie in the…it was most probably in the ‘60’s sometime – we went to 131 – there was no telephone. So we arrived at 131 Cardington Road and the lady opened the door and I addressed her by the name of the lady who was a widow, who had Muriel and Jack, and she said, “Hugo, my mother is not alive anymore.” She was the spitting image by this time – had grown very fat and much older – of Muriel herself. So many years had passed and I had sort of, for a moment, I was back there, back in 1939 for a moment. And of course we brought her some presents. They were very low class in the sense of earning money. Jack was not alive anymore. Of course the cocker spaniel wasn’t alive anymore. She lived alone. From No. 1 Cardington Road, where I stayed quite a long time, I finally left school. I left school, “Silver Jubilee School”.

Q: So we understand from you saying that you went to visit them again that it was a nice time with them?

A: I can’t complain about any of the…I would say that the treatment we received, except for, as I mentioned, in this home which I was for a short stay, except for Mr. White, I can only remember everybody that we met in Bedford, both as refugees and evacuees, which is a very important period of our lives, I think that we remember…I cannot remember anything which would disturb me today if it happened to my children or so forth. They were extremely, extremely good to us, within the limits of what they could afford. These were poor families. None of the rich families in Bedford took in evacuees. There weren’t any Jewish families. But none of the…maybe right at the end. We’ll get to the last home where I stayed, which I remember. Mr. and Mrs. Turtle. They were most probably among the upper middle class because he was the postmaster general of Bedford, so he was a well-earning gentleman.

Q: But your title at that time was evacuee more than refugee, right?

A: It was definitely, as far as the official position that we had with respect to a name and a number, we were evacuees. Once we became friendly with the people, we were accepted into a home as evacuees, and only after we arrived at the home, discussing where are we from and so forth, it became clear that we are also refugees.

Q: Yes, but they related to you as evacuees.

A: Absolutely. Not only that. They didn’t know whether we were refugees before they agreed. I mean, there wasn’t a selection process, where somebody came to pick up children. Somebody advised a certain organization in Bedford that they were willing to take a child for twelve shillings a week. I mean, you have no idea. I mean, we most probably ate twice as much as twelve shillings a week, or maybe not, but it was worthwhile to share whatever they were doing, their homes. We did everything ourselves. We washed our clothing, we repaired our clothing. At least, I did. And I think that most of the boys learned to do all these things so that they wouldn’t be a burden on the English family.

Q: But for them you were mostly, even after they knew you, those families, for them, I assume, you were mostly an evacuee.

A: No.

Q: They related more to your being a refugee?

A: I would say so. Definitely. Because remember that all the evacuees, the English evacuees from London, had their parents in London, and their parents would come and visit them. Here was a bunch of children, a number of children, maybe thirty or forty in Bedford from this hostel in London, which had no parents, had no relatives. So it was a very different situation, once they asked you, “Is your mother coming to visit you?” So I said, “No, my mother can’t visit me because she in Brno, in Czechoslovakia.” “Czechoslovakia? Who has ever heard of Czechoslovakia? Is it the same as Yugoslavia,” or whatever. You know? That sort of discussion. I am speaking about the first few families. Slowly but surely, as the war progressed, everybody from the news and from the movietone news in the cinema and the radio realized what Czechoslovakia was about. Poland, Germany. All the various differences. And slowly it became clear to the people in England that there is a difference between Germans and German Jews. At the beginning, and most probably at the beginning of the war, most of the boys and girls above the age of, I don’t know, sixteen or something, were considered as aliens, and some of them were even put into camps in England, although they were Jewish. And it took some time…

Q: Some of them were deported.

A: Could be, yes, but I am speaking of 1940 already, and I know from Fritz Gross’s in-laws that he wanted to join the army and they were put into a special force which was called the “Pioneer Corps”. They didn’t have rifles or anything like that. They were supposed to dig the trenches and do the manual labour.

Q: How were they called? Gunsmiths or something?

A: Don’t know. They were called the “Pioneer Corps”.

Q: Yes, but didn’t you say that the army used them as…?

A: Gun fodder? No. No. I don’t think so. I think that happened in Russia, but I don’t think that…

Q: The image of Chamberlain with the umbrella, what happened in Czechoslovakia, the Munich Agreement – did ordinary people in England pay attention to it?

A: I think that they realized that Chamberlain who promise them “peace in our time”, which was something that people were aware of, and the difference, the warlike attitude of Churchill, Winston Churchill, made Chamberlain unpopular because of the popularity of Winston Churchill. Maybe if Chamberlain had stayed on as Prime Minister in spite of the fact that he signed the Munich Agreement, maybe he would have also become popular. Maybe. But the fact that Winston Churchill, although Winston Churchill had a much worse record from World War I, became extremely popular, and we certainly, wherever we came into contact, and they discussed this, ”How is it that you came?”, we certainly knew about Munich, about the Sudetenland evacuation, because some of the children came from Sudetenland. Not in our group, but some of them came from there.

Q: But ordinary people, the English, ordinary people – they didn’t really pay too much attention to it.

A: No. they were busy with the war. They were afraid of an invasion.

Q: War and making a living.

A: Most probably the last few words are the best description. They were poor people that we were with. And having learned later how the Americans chased the dollar, I can’t say the same for the English, although they were rationed. As an example, at No. 1 Cardington Road – it is amazing that I can’t remember for a moment, because usually you remember from the past better than from happened yesterday. I do remember one thing. I was sent to Saintsbury’s, which is a very famous general food store still in existence. Mrs. Graham. Jack, Murial and Mrs. Graham. By the way, most of the children called the landladies – they were called landladies – “Auntie”. ”Auntie Graham” and so forth. I don’t remember her Christian name. Jack Graham, and so forth. Mrs. Graham used to send me early in the morning to Saintsbury’s to collect the rations, which was like two ounces of tea, butter, one egg a week, and a shilling’s worth of meat. So I arrived at Saintbury’s early in the morning – and I am saying early. Must have been around about six o’clock in the morning. School started at eight and I had to do a few more chores in between. I arrived and I remember the man to this very day, standing behind the counter, hanging up…behind him were chickens, cleaned chickens, and on the table – he was cleaning these chickens, removing feathers and so forth, and removing the innards. In other words, there was a pile of chicken livers and a pile of chicken stomachs. “What sort of meat would you like for your one shilling?” The whole idea was, if you wanted really good meat, you would get very little weight for one shilling. If you wanted really inexpensive meat, you would get more. And what happened was that if we were, Jack, Muriel, Mrs. Graham and myself, we were four, so there were four cards, so we would get four shillings’ worth of meat. So I said to him, “Could I have, for my shilling’s worth, some of the chicken livers?” So he said, “In England we don’t eat. These are for the cats and for the dogs.” So I said, “Please let me have.” So he packed this whole pile of chicken livers and I said, “What about the stomachs?” And he said, “You can have those as well.” And I said, “But I only have one shilling.” “You’re not going to pay either for the livers or for the chickens,” and I got my four shillings’ worth of meat. I came back to Mrs. Graham, “schlepping” these chicken livers and so and so. “God,” the cocker spaniel – I have forgotten his name – “can’t possibly eat all this.” “I am going to cook you some chopped liver.” “Chopped liver?” “Of course.” They had never heard. “And I am going to make a goulash.” And of course they had never heard of the word “goulash”. So I went into the garden. Everybody grew their vegetables. Took out onions, took my egg, which I had, and I made – as I said before, mentioned before, I was very welcome in my mother’s kitchen. I knew exactly how to make chopped liver and certainly knew how to make goulash. The problem was, there was no paprika. Not in the home. So I needed paprika for this goulash. Somehow – I don’t know where we went, whether I went back to Saintsbury’s – I made goulash out of the stomachs and chopped liver, and I can tell you, within one month the neighbours were paying Saintsbury’s for the chicken livers. Not the stomachs. They couldn’t, they weren’t interested in goulash. It was out of their…because they couldn’t make a meat pie out of it, so they weren’t popular. So I can say I introduced chopped liver into Bedford in 1939 or beginning of 1940.

Q: You can say that you have the credit for improving the kind of…

A: The kitchen.

Q: The English kitchen.

A: Cordon Bleu of Bedford! Usually the compulsory school age was between thirteen and fourteen, depending on what month you were born in. So I had to leave school and the only way to continue in a private school, in a higher school, was to get a scholarship, because there was nobody to pay for us. So I went to work.

Q: Just a minute. Before that. When you went to school, wasn’t it very difficult at the beginning? You came from another language, another culture, another mentality.

A: I must say that it was most probably very difficult for my brother, more difficult than for me, because I remember that…answering this question three and a half months approximately…I remember that we arrived in August, on the 3rd of August. Sometime in November, in Bedford, a question as to how we got on with our English was mentioned. So in four months’ time, even my brother, because he played a lot of soccer with the other boys and we were at the school – not “Silver Jubilee School”. We were together at the same school, the second school. My brother stayed in the previous school because it was closer to where he lived. I would say that we were speaking pretty good English in four months’ time. I couldn’t speak Czech to him. There was nobody else to speak Czech, and I had no choice. And he was in exactly the same position because there was nobody in his class who spoke Czech. They were either speaking German. The Tomashof boys, one was younger than him and Aharon Tomashof, who is still alive, Willie Tomashof, was older than Rudy. So I think…

Q: And it was a problem at that time to speak German.

A: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. I think that all the German refugees, Jewish, in Bedford, very quickly picked up English. Remember one thing. They were already a year in England, so they all spoke English pretty well. With a German accent and so forth. It was immediately identified. We didn’t have this accent, so also we were accepted much quicker.

Q: Did you make English friends?

A: Oh yes. We had only English friends. There were no…we had, during the whole week, we had English friends just as much as at school. For instance, I remember one incident at the “Silver Jubilee School”. I think I wasn’t in the top class yet, but during the break – I was very popular because I played soccer and participated in cricket and so forth. Sports were a very important issue and I was…so was my brother very popular because of it. We played well.

Q: I suppose there were kinds of sports that you never knew before.

A: Cricket we had never heard of, of course.

Q: And rugby, if they had.

A: Not in this school. Much later on, but as you say, this level of school, elementary schools. “Silver Jubilee School” was an elementary school. And in elementary school you had cricket and what the Americans call soccer, or football. Football and cricket. A lot of gym. Exercises and so forth. There was a gym for indoor exercises because in winter it was sometimes very difficult. But usually, I would say that if it was a six-day week at school, which it was, at least five afternoons were dedicated to sport, so it was very, very sport…And that’s England on the whole, if I remember correctly. At least at the “Silver Jubilee School”. They had an enormous playground. Most of the schools had very large football and cricket grounds, separate, completely separate.

Q: So for you it was very good, the emphasis on sport and physical activity.

A: Oh yes. I liked it very much. I preferred outdoor sports, of course, because we had played football back at home. We had never played cricket, so I preferred to stay with football, but there is a season, a certain time in summer when most of the kids played cricket, so I played cricket.

Q: Did you receive any special treatment or something in particular in school because you were, besides being an evacuee, you were also a refugee without family.

A: No, I don’t think so. I think that we were very fairly treated and I think that…apart from my relationship with Mr. Gross, the art teacher, which had nothing to do with all the others. And he became very friendly with the other masters many years later. Because we came out of a much higher standard family, later on relationships developed, but I would say, I remember – I started telling you – I remember an incident where during a break a bully, a fellow who was most probably from a higher class and also at least a head taller than myself called me a “dirty Jew”. And everybody was around there and he was standing up against a wall and I went…

Q: This was the first time.

A: This was the first time that anybody addressed me like this. And I hit him very, very hard. He went back and hit his head on the wall that he was standing up against. He was badly hurt, from his head, from going back. And a few minutes later we were brought in before the headmaster, Mr. J. J. Voyce. And we were both… “Who started it?” And of course I didn’t say a word of what was said, and he didn’t say what was said, so we were both caned, very seriously caned, on our hands, which was the form of punishment. And at the end…this was in the headmaster’s, in the master’s room, with all the teachers there, and at the end, he said, “Hugo Meisl, from this afternoon you are a prefect.” Now in the English school system, there are children chosen from the class who are responsible for law and order whilst the teacher is away. They are usually chosen because of their behaviour more than their knowledge, popularity, and, of course, position in class. By this time, when this happened, I was already the best pupil in the class, so as far as your English was concerned, even if my English perhaps…by this time my English was most probably better than most of them because I had a grammatical background back from home, so I had a better background. Perhaps my vocabulary wasn’t as good. So I became a junior prefect as a result of this and by the time I left I was a senior prefect. In other words, by the time I left school, the last class. Trying to think of whether we received any special treatment – I don’t remember. I remember also an effort. I think the effort was on the part of all the refugee children to assimilate as quickly as possible. And the assimilation took place more on the football field and playing cricket and so forth than it did apart from school. I can say this – we did not mix after school. There was no such a thing as mixing at that time. I can tell you this – I joined the Boy Scouts. Now, the Boy Scouts were not connected with the school. In other words, the Scouts, the Scout Master and the Scouts generally was an organization separate from the school. And for the same reason I joined the Scouts because of the possibility to go out into…

Q: From that minute on, after the incident with that bully, no one tried to mess with you?

A: No, never again. Not because of that, but because…I think most probably because I was good at football. I was popular because of that, and I helped others. Because I was the best pupil I helped them to copy and so forth. All the type of things that…fair play and so forth was something which was very close to my…

Q: About the special treatment – no one of the teachers, for example, had pity for you?

A: I would say that…I cannot remember anybody…I was very close to two teachers – the mathematics teacher and to the English teacher, whose name I can’t remember at the moment. Morgan was the English teacher. As a result of this incident, the headmaster, Mr. Voyce, who was a very good friend, because he was better educated than all the other teachers – he became a very good friend of Fritz Gross, the architect. Not only at that time, but many years later…and after I left school, through Fritz Gross, there was a relationship that kept on through correspondence, through meetings and through the fact the Fritz Gross used to tell me about him meeting Voyce after he left “Silver Jubilee School”. Fritz Gross, after leaving the school, became the town planner for Bedford, to modernize the city, which he did. And he had a very good relation with Mr. Morgan for many years and he painted his daughter, I remember. There is a picture somewhere in the galleries of his daughter. But I don’t remember, except for Fritz Gross, any special treatment as a result of the fact that I was a refugee. Maybe there was something in it. I think it was more because of popularity in football, sports, and of course in class. I set an example, let’s put it that way.

Q: With Fritz Gross did you speak German or English?

A: No, English. German was just…

Q: Even when you visited his home?

A: Yes. He used to speak in German to his wife, so I could understand, but he never spoke, they never spoke German to me. His daughter was two years younger than myself and of course she went to English schools. She went to a very good school. They could obviously afford it, so they sent her to the Bedford Modern School of Girls, which was really a private school. You had to pay to go there.

Q: What was going after the elementary school? You said there was a problem because you couldn’t afford yourself and you needed a scholarship.

A: Yes. The advantage at this point, we had a certain advantage. The aliens, which were the German boys, had much greater difficulty even if they could pass the scholarship. It wasn’t so easy for them to be accepted in the schools that they wanted to go to. We were Allies, the Czechs were Allies, so it was easier for us. And I started work with a cobbler, you know, to learn the profession of repairing shoes. And during this time I moved in with him. He had a shoe store in Cardington Road, practically opposite No. 1 Cardington Road, and he lived in the loft. And he arranged for me…I worked for him, let’s say, ten, twelve hours a day, learning the profession. An apprenticeship basically I started. And at the same time, he bought me books so that I could prepare myself for scholarship exams. And already by that time I decided I would try to get a scholarship at a technical school, with the idea – I don’t remember whether I mentioned it already. When I arrived in England I wrote to my parents that I wanted to be involved in aviation. Of course, this became an obsession really, in a way. So I wanted to get into the Northwestern Polytechnic, which was a technical school, high school, which went onto, sort of, university from there. And I tried for a scholarship, and during that time he arranged in the loft a special lamp for me so that after work I would be able to study for the scholarship. I don’t know the dates exactly, but I had got to the stage that I was about to start learning how to sew the soles of shoes. Now, there was one thing which went in parallel. As we were only receiving something like sixpence a week pocket money from a Jewish organization, from the same organization which ran the hostel in London, they established a sort of a home at No. 2 Sydney Road in Bedford for all these children that were in the home in Crinklewood, so that they would stay Jewish and have somewhere to go on Shabbat and on Sunday. One of the unique things that happened – we, all these children from this hostel, established a youth synagogue in Bedford. I think it was in a Scouts’ hall and the synagogue, of course, was only run on Saturdays, and it was run by us. We would invite into Bedford, families used to come from London over the weekend because of the bombing, the “blitz” and so forth. So whenever a rabbi or somebody who could lead a congregation would come, we would invite him to lead the congregation. And there were a number of families…

Q: To lead the congregation means to give a sermon?

A: No, from the beginning to end. Let’s say we started eight thirty or nine o’clock in the morning. Normal Sabbath service. And at the end of the Sabbath service at lunchtime, these families, English families, English Jewish families, whose some of their children were among the evacuees – one of them was a family called Fischer. They had two boys and I think they are both still alive. Geoffrey Fischer. I have forgotten the name of his brother. They were also evacuated. And his parents used to come for the weekend and they had a home there and they would invite us for Saturday lunch. This is how I got to know Mr. Rose, who was a Bedfordian, born in Bedford and so forth. Now apart from this activity at No. 2 Sydney Road, which was run by a Mr. and Mrs. Harris – they had a son by the name of Ansel. He is not alive anymore. And Joan Harris is still alive – this is the daughter – and she lives in an old-age home in Kfar Saba. A couple of years ago we went to see her with Tomashof. I have a picture somewhere of the whole group in Bedford, of the Jewish group. Of course, we were, the five boys, we were the only Czech boys. All of the others were, as I said, German Jewish boys. What I started telling you before you asked that question was that as my brother and I were receiving sixpence a week, which wasn’t enough to buy clothing, to hardly buy stamps to send letters home. We were still sending letters through the Red Cross and through Sweden and Hungary and Yugoslavia – that I remember. We got all sorts of addresses. I decided very early – I was still at No. 131 Cardington Road – I got a job working, delivering newspapers, which brought in something like between eight to ten shillings a week. So you can imagine my landlady was receiving twelve shillings for looking after us. So from this money, which I shared with my brother, I would buy whatever we needed, like socks and shirts and whatever, you know, we grew out of, and so on. Apart from that, the man who I worked for, did my apprenticeship, he realized that I used to spend a lot of time walking to where Rudy lived and he wanted…some of the shops had bicycles, so we would walk to the store, something like five o’clock in the morning, very early, in the dark, complete darkness, and collect the papers from the railway station, with the bicycle, which belonged to the store, and delivered the newspapers and then go to school. So in order to help me to go to Rudy and so forth, he bought from the police pound, where they impounded bicycles that were either stolen or found, for a shilling and a half. He bought the bicycle, which was completely rusty and so forth, and he painted it and put it together so I would have my own bicycle and I could work for anybody, doing paper rounds. So I spent quite some time very early in the mornings, and that’s how I got a bad back, because I didn’t have a long enough pullover to cover my back on a bicycle. And finally I passed the scholarship which was the school Northwestern Polytechnic, which is a London college, was moved to Bedford. They were evacuated to Luton, which was about, I think about half an hour to forty-five minutes by train from Bedford to Luton. So the scholarship included a season ticket for the railway and, of course, they paid for schooling and my books and so forth. So I got a full scholarship at the Northwestern Polytechnic. And at this time, I left the apprenticeship, as I said, at a stage where to this day I could most probably fix most…except for sewing I could fix any shoe. In those days shoes were not repaired like they are today. Glues were not used in the same sense. People used wooden pegs and nails to repair soles and so forth. I was rebilleted – to billet is to put somebody, to live with somebody – I was rebilleted with this family, which was the last family in Bedford, by the name of Turtle, as I mentioned before.

Q: Turtle is turtle?

A: That’s right. Turtle. Mr. and Mrs. Turtle. Mr. Turtle was the postmaster general of Bedford, which is a very high position.

Q: (too much background noise)

A: Most probably yes. Slow mail. That’s good. That’s a good point. I never thought of that. But Mrs. Turtle was a very…they were better educated and so forth. They had a daughter. I was about nineteen. We are talking about 1943. I was fifteen. She was, I think, eighteen or nineteen. They had a French boy by the name of Jacques living with them. He was from a French family, evacuated from London, and he was living there. And she loved playing bridge. Now, to play bridge you have to have four people. So when Mr. Turtle and Jacques and her daughter were present, I was allowed to go and play football, but very often he was at work till very late in the evening and they played bridge in the afternoon when I was supposed to play football. And by this time I was already going to Luton and back, so I played football in the park, which was very close, just with the boys. Not an organized football game as we had…And I remember very clearly that I was very annoyed that she forced me to play bridge. Taught me how to play bridge and forced me to play with them.

Q: The daughter or the mother?

A: The mother. Mrs. Turtle. And I was very rude to her because I noticed that she had false teeth, so in order to insult her, because she used to shout at me and say, “Sit down. This is more important than football” and so forth. And I used to make fun of her, that she had false teeth, you know, because by that time I knew that most of the English people, in order not to go to dentists, very early in life had their teeth removed. Something which was very general until after the war, when European dentistry came to England. And one day she had a bad cold and we were sitting around this green table and she sneezed and both her plates came out among the cards and I looked at her and I said, “You see, Mrs. Turtle, you’ve been lying to me. You’ve got false teeth.” So she said, “Get out of here. I don’t want to see you playing bridge anymore.” And I went to play football. So I remember that incident very clearly. Otherwise, I enjoyed being there because I made very good friends with Jacques. Jacques was not Jewish. No, I don’t think so. But talking about religion, the Turtles were British Israelites, which was a sect that believed that they were the lost tribe of Israel. They were Protestants, but they believed they were the lost tribe of Israel, so there was a lot of discussion, and for the first time I could speak about what I had learned about Moses. You know, at home we…

Q: That means more respect for you?

A: Yes, I think. Definitely. Yes, absolutely. Definitely. And I stayed there and Rudy stayed…The whole time Rudy was with this one family. That means till 1943. In 1943, through the connection which…Fritz Gross’s wife was the sister of Mrs. Arbesberg, Erna Arbesberg. And Erna and Leo Arbesberg, the in-laws, lived in London. They had a small factory manufacturing handbags. Francie Gross, Fritz’s wife, they were from Vienna. Erna Arbesberg, her sister, was from Vienna, and Leo Arbesberg was from Lvov in Poland, and he was involved in a matchmaking manufacturing plant in Lvov, very well known family. And they got out to England somehow. And their daughter Susie – they had one daughter Susie, who is still alive. She is in Israel at the moment, at the present time. Through them, Leo Arbesberg invite me to come to London, got to know the two of us, my brother and I, and one day he said, “I am going to take you to the Czech embassy to see the minister. I have a friend who works at the Ministry of Education of the Czech government in exile in London.” (end of tape)

Q: Before we get to the Czech exiled government, till what point did you have any connection with your family in Czechoslovakia?

A: I was just going to mention that somehow, so we are thinking on the same lines. I think that I have letters – it should take a minute to check, but from memory – I think till the end of 1940, beginning of ’41. I remember receiving letters from my parents saying that within a few months I am going to be “bar mitzvah”, and asking me, first of all lecturing me of what it means to be “bar mitzvah”. A very long letter from my father and my mother. My responsibilities, Jewish, etc. In life generally. And I would say these are among the last letters, so we are talking about…I was 1928, so we are talking about 1941. And following that – and I think these letters already came through the Red Cross. Some letters came through Hungary, some letters came through Yugoslavia. When I say “some”, maybe one or two. And also from Sweden, where my father knew…when he was in World War I, he served with a Czech officer who became an officer in the Swedish army. Somehow, most probably after the First World War, went to Sweden, because he had a Czech name and they were friends. And through him I also have some letters. By the time, by 1940, I know I have no correspondence from concentration camp, and they left, like most of the Jews from Brno, at the end of ’41, beginning of ’42. I think in April ’42.

Q: Spring of ’42.

A: ’42, spring of ’42.

Q: To Theresienstadt?

A: To Theresienstadt, where they were, my mother, my father and my grandmother from my mother’s side, who was the only grandmother I knew, was there only for three or four days because in the Theresienstadt museum I have the documents…

Q: Givat Haim.

A: Givat Haim. I have the documents of their arrival and what transport they went to Auschwitz. I have no correspondence, but the family that I mentioned before, the Sekal family, who were very closely connected. He was the skiing master, together with my mother, and tennis. He with letters that arrived from us through the Red Cross or through one of these instances to Poland, to the camp where my mother was working, which I found out much later, running a kitchen in a prisoner…as far as I know. Whether this is true or not, it’s difficult to prove today because he is not alive anymore. He risked his life to take letters to her, to this camp, and from what he told us after the war when we met him after the revolution, this Velvet Revolution, 1989. He was still alive and he told Martha, my wife, and I that he’d been to this camp and that he delivered the letters and also I have…maybe he received some little pieces of paper. It’s very difficult to tell. There are no dates. Through the fence, apparently, they met.

Q: In Auschwitz.

A: Not in Auschwitz. Near Auschwitz. I know the name of the place. I haven’t been there. We have been planning to go there, but because my wife Martha was in Auschwitz and many other camps, we sort of haven’t gone back there. Although I know the name and I have corresponded to the mayor of this little village where this Russian prisoner-of-war camp was. By the end of 1942 I think the camp was already, after Stalingrad most probably, or about that time, I think they destroyed the camp and they were all…All this comes from witness statements made to the court after the war in Brno. The courts, in order to issue (?), which is a death certificate, the courts had to have evidence that a person either died, saw him die, or who was the last person to see. So both my father’s and my mother’s death certificate are based on people who…there were lists in courts where people who…the question was, “Many did you see Pavel Meisl or Erna Meislova last?” And people would put down names and then they took the last date and compared it to the information they had about the destruction of certain camps, and based on this, I have death certificates. Not actual from…I haven’t written to these people in Germany, where they most probably have better records. The Red Cross confirms more or less the same dates. So by 1943, when Leo Arbesburg took us to London from Bedford, both Rudy and I, and introduces us – the world is very small – introduces us to the director general of the Czech Ministry of Education in exile in London, to a Mr. Pollack. This Mr. Pollack in 1950-something, when I was working for the Israeli embassy in London, was in London still and it came to light that he was the brother of Martha’s first cousin’s wife. So it is such a small world. From the same place, in Sevlus, in Carpathoruthenia. Anyhow. We brought in by Leo to this very large room of the Ministry in London, somewhere near the palace, I remember. And there was a small man sitting behind the desk and he spoke to us in Czech and I answered him. My Czech wasn’t very good anymore. Four years had gone by. We hadn’t spoken Czech. I don’t think Rudy spoke Czech anymore. A few words here and there. And they agreed to accept us, because Leo’s influence or connections, although he was Polish, they accepted us to the Czech State Secondary School, which was being opened in Wales, in central Wales, in Llanwrtyd Wells – that’s the name of the place – in the Abbananlake (sp?) Hotel. This state secondary school was the continuation of the schooling that the Czech government in exile provided for children of the diplomats, for children of the serving pilots, soldiers in the Czech army in Great Britain. But not for Czech refugees that had no connections with the government, so it was an unusual situation, that a number of the children were well known – their parents in Czechoslovakia served for the government, or they were in the army, the parents were in the army, and so on and so forth. So we were, in a way, very lucky to get into this school because we had no connections.

Q: But you wanted another school at that time. The technical school.

A: I was. We jumped. From the beginning of the term in 1941 till 1943 I was at this Northwestern Polytechnic in Luton, and every day to stay with Mrs. Turtle. Okay?

Q: At that time there was already the airport in Luton?

A: I don’t know. I don’t know. I can’t tell you. I can only tell you that my movements in Luton were very limited. The railway station got onto a bus and the bus, the last station on the edge of Luton was the Luton Modern School, which became the home also of the Northwestern Polytechnic. And so I would arrive fifteen, twenty minutes before school started on the train, go on the bus. I had to leave class at exactly a certain moment to catch the train to get into…So I don’t think I remember, except after the war, visiting Luton when we were in Bedford, ever the town.

Q: So the school didn’t have a direct connection to aviation?

A: No. My first connection to aviation…in fact, the school had a connection to the army and I joined, whilst I was at school – by this time I was fifteen years old and they what they called an army cadet corps at the school. Like the “gadna” in Israel. So my first army training, rifle training and so forth I received in Luton, at the Northwestern Polytechnic. And finally, when we got to the Czech school in Wales, there, instead of an army cadet corps, they had an air training corps, which was the first time that I went into a blue uniform.

Q: So you were two years studying in Luton, and then with those connections that you talked about you could go to this school in Wales.

A: That’s right.

Q: And although Bedford is not such a big city and Luton, of course, is not such a big city, Wales…

A: Miles away.

Q: Anyway, you were close to London. When we come to London today we go through Luton, so Wales is…

A: Miles away, yes. It was a big change.

Q: Not only the distance. The language, the people.

A: We had, from this point…Let me explain this. It meant taking our suitcase and whatever we had, which wasn’t very much, reporting at the railway station on a certain day and traveling by train, fast and slow train, local train, four hours, something like four hours, maybe a little longer, to get to the Llanwrtyd Wells railway station, which was in Bracken, which is in central Wales. And walking distance, three minutes, next to the station, was a very large hotel, pictures of which I have, called the Abbananlake (sp?) Hotel. There was a lake and the hotel was converted to a first, in England ever, co-educational boarding school. You had co-educational schools. In other words, boys and girls, not in the same class, if I remember, but certainly in one school. This was a boarding school. I mean, even universities, never mind secondary schools, but even universities had separate universities for woman and for men, in England, to this day. So this was unusual. We arrived there at the beginning of the 1943 school year, and we were there till the end of the war.

Q: Till that moment you had no connection to the exiled Czech government in London?

A: Nothing whatsoever. This was the first time when we started feeling, and this was the main issue of the school, very nationalistic. To bring back these children to the nationalistic pre-war Czechoslovakia. Masaryk, Benisch, and so forth. To make us aware, even those that were not so aware before the war. I have a very good friend here from Slovakia who, the parents didn’t want to go back to Slovakia because of anti-Semitism, something which I didn’t experience, as I said before. But even he became a patriot.

Q: But at that time you were already four years in England. You hardly knew Czech anymore, so the connections to the country and to the people were loosened somehow. And now you were again with people from Czechoslovakia. It was kind of new to you.

A: We were patriots, Czech patriots, in spite of being in Bedford the time. We followed what was happening with the Czech air force, with the army in Tobruk. We always followed it and we followed it for two reasons. Number 1, the Czechs were very popular during the war, different to the other…Even more popular than the Poles and the French and the Dutch and which other allies during World War II. It is right that we had no education from the age of, my brother eight and I from the age of ten in Czech, so we came six years later. I dropped one class because instead of going into “sexta” I went into “quinta”, and I wasn’t the only one, because by 1943, there were only a few that went to Hinton Hall. These were other elementary schools, Czech schools run by the government. These were the children that came to England, found themselves in basically…a hundred and sixty children found themselves to be at an age to go to this secondary school – and of course there were Czechs in England that didn’t go to…that stayed in English schools and so forth. I have a very good friend, Professor…what’s his name?, who was in the “kindertransport”, from Amiad. Kibbutz Amiad. I’ll remember his name in a minute. I spoke to him a few days ago – who never left the English families and can’t speak Czech to this day because he forgot the language completely. So we were definitely patriotic. We were interested in learning Czech back again. It came to us relatively well because we went to Czech schools as children.

Q: But you spoke English between yourselves?

A: Spoke English between…yes. We spoke English. I, with my brother, of course I spoke in English. I spoke English with a lot of the children who had forgotten Czech or that Czech was a secondary language because they came from German Jewish-speaking families in Czechoslovakia. Last week we had a visit from Prague, Ruth Adler, Adlerova. Today her name is Halova. She was in “octava”. I don’t know whether you know, but the Czech school system, the classes are named with Latin. So I went to “quinta”. She matriculated at the school, and only yesterday I got a letter from John Ehrman. He changed his name to John Eden. Who lives in Canada. Was chief engineer in Canada of TransCanadian Airlines. John Ehrman, this John Ehrman, who is a first cousin of Ruth Federman, of the Federman hotels, who is also Czech – he joined the air force, didn’t come to the school, but only to pass his matriculation. So he came to the school whilst I was there and he prepared himself a few weeks. Most probably had leave from the army, from the air force – he was on a pilots’ course – and he came to school. Ruth Adler was there from 1943 to 1945. She is eighty-two. She is two years older than myself, so she matriculated in 1945. Today she is a doctor of biology and so forth. She is retired, of course. She went back with us, but never left Czechoslovakia. Married and stayed during the entire Russian Communist regime and so forth. She has just written a book, which I am reading at the present moment. So there were three groups of children. Basically three groups. Non-Jewish, German-speaking, Jewish that knew they were Jewish, Czech-speaking. A lot of the children, most probably seventy-five percent, were no longer Jewish in the sense that they were practicing Judaism because either they were sent out as non-Jews, “Besvesnanyi”, atheists, or what is called without belief. “Besvenanyi” is like without religion, without belief. Or as a result of their being refugees in England, with English families. They were adopted not from the point of view of legal adoption, but they were adopted in the sense into the family religious-wise. In other words, some of them became Baptists, some of them became Catholics, some of them became Protestants, Church of England, and so forth.

Q: What section were you in? Because at that time I suppose you weren’t religious anymore, living so many years with non-Jews and no Jewish company.

A: Well, I mentioned before that the German hostel in London, Crinklewood, got Mr. Harris, Mr. and Mrs. Harris, to come to Bedford and establish a Jewish youth centre. This Jewish youth centre made an effort to keep all the refugees who were from that home in the Jewish faith. They helped us to establish the youth synagogue, to the extent that by the time I came to the Czech school in 1943 I was already “bar-mitzvah’ed”. I could lead a service from beginning to end on the Sabbath. I knew every word, I knew all the melodies and so forth. I didn’t know what I was reading, just like everybody else who came from a similar background. So here I came to the Czech State Secondary School, which “b’koshi”, as we say in Hebrew, had a “minyan”, and I am not sure that we had a “minyan”. In other words, out of the hundred and sixty children, there were most probably thirty, maybe, at the most, of boys and girls who knew they were Jewish and who kept up the Judaism to the extent that, like Masaryk had arranged, we had two to three teachers – one of them was Rabbi Stransky, who then came to Haifa many years later. In other words, we had a regular Sabbath service just as the Catholics had a regular Sunday service in the boat house. So there was a chapel, which was a chapel on Sunday, and it was a synagogue on Saturday and of course during the High Holidays. Now, some of the High Holidays were holidays so that the school closed down, like perhaps Chanukah or something like that. When it was Christmas-time, children went back to their families. We didn’t have anywhere to go back to. We didn’t have our family, but during the summer holidays, both in 1944 – and I remember 1944 very clearly. A part of the holiday we went to stay in London with the Artesbergs. At least once or twice they arranged for us to stay in a hotel during the holiday and we would run around London. To the extent that Leo and Erna Artesberg, when the war finished, wanted to adopt us, when they found out that none of the parents, you know, the lists did not include any of the parents, they wanted to adopt us, but we felt we had to go back because of the teaching and the way that the school made big patriots out of us. And apart from the fact by this time I had joined the air training corps, the Czech squadron of the air training corps, which was established at the school mainly for those who were old enough to join. And of course this was in line with what I wanted to do. Especially after a particular incident that happened at Llanwrtyd Wells, that above the school, an English bomber blew up, most probably on a return trip, and I was among the first to arrive. The crew – there was a crew of ten – some of them were still alive, but they died because they fell without parachutes from very low altitude, which made us even more wanting to join the war effort. It’s interesting to mention that Ruth Adlerova, who I met this week, who came to Israel on a visit – she mentioned an incident when Bondy, Otto Bondy, who was one of the Jewish Czech children, who lives in New Jersey in the United States today, Otto Bondy raided the chapel and drank all the Catholic wine which was used by Schpachek, I think was his name, who was the padre. So many years later people remember incidents like this.

Q: You had connection to Ruth Bondy?

A: No. Ruth Bondy has a connection with Martha, that they both came, I think, together on the same boat, at the same time, to Israel. She would have to confirm that, but I think so. And of course we have a connection with her because of her Czech background and so forth.

Q: So you were studying in a nice environment. Since you were in boarding school you were not dependent on the local population. Your school was separate. You had no contact with the locals, or little?

A: We had a quite a lot of contact. First of all. We had contact – it is a very small village. By the way, I’m an honourary citizen, like all the Czech students, of Llanwrtyd Wells – for many reasons. A) because the air training corps, which was established at the Czech State Secondary School, accepted the boys, the cadets from Llanwrtyd Wells, so it was joint effort. And the commanding officer, Mr. Lloyd, Wing Commander, or Flight Lieutenant Lloyd, I don’t remember, of this squadron was from Llanwrtyd Wells. He was an English flying officer. So there was contact at the level of air training corps. In addition to that, the Czech State Secondary School had a football team, a very good football team, which played against other schools in Wales and in England and we travelled all over. My brother and I were both on the football team.

Q: So you represented…?

A: Czechoslovakia.

Q: Ah, not the village you were in?

A: No, we played against them. We had no members on the team from Llanwrtyd Wells, but because the village was three minutes away, there was just no way, when we sent shopping and so forth, that we wouldn’t meet with them. Secondly, during the summer holidays, or any holidays, some of us who didn’t go back, and especially my brother and I, who didn’t go to their parents in London or wherever, we worked for the local farmers. So I, for instance, worked on a sheep farm. I rode a horse, collecting sheep for the dip, which is when they take sheep once a year and put them through antiseptics in order to prevent them from getting worms and so forth. Other children worked for the milkman, delivering milk, and so forth. So there was a connection. We knew all the storekeepers. We knew the post office because we used the post office so often. Moshe Zvikal, whose father was in the Czech army, his mother lived actually in Llanwrtyd Wells, came to live in Llanwrtyd Wells. She was the only mother that moved to Llanwrtyd Wells to be close to her only son, and so we got to know her. And she lived, of course, in a Welsh home and so forth. So there was a connection and it was a very friendly connection to the extent that after the war, our first reunion of the school was…the Abbenanlake Hotel became a hotel again. It is a hotel to this day. And at least on three or four occasions in the last, since 1985, I think the first reunion was forty from us leaving, and I think they have had three or four reunions at the…In fact, Sir Nicholas Winton came to at least two of these reunions. By the way, he is in hospital back in London. He is ninety-eight years old. And he was not recognized by Yad Vashem because his parents weren’t Jewish, although…There were two reasons. A) because his parents weren’t Jewish and the second reason, which is a more logical one, that by being in Prague in 1938 and organizing this “kindertransport” from Czechoslovakia, he didn’t endanger his life. So one of the conditions of Yad Vashem was that the person was under danger from the Nazis, which he wasn’t.

Q: What about that he was not Jewish. Jewish do not…?

A: Do not…that’t right. So, of course, he is not Jewish, nor were his parents. His grandparents were Jewish. His parents were Jewish by the Nuremburg laws, by our religious laws, but they were Baptists before they came to England. Anyhow, Winton is recovering now from…Czechoslovakia, Minoch (sp?) who made the film, this film about Nicholas Winton and the “kindertransport” – it is a very famous film – they organized three hundred and twenty-thousand signatures last month in Prague to recommend Sir Nicholas Winton for the Nobel Prize for saving life. And I’m told – I spoke to him the other day in hospital – I’m told that a famous Czech musician wrote a melody, a symphony or something, which was played at this reunion, and he came to Prague, he was invited. A Czech state secondary school was to be renamed – he gave permission for the school to be renamed in his name. And he is very jolly. I spoke to him a couple of days ago, still in hospital in Maidenhead, and he hopes to get out. And I hope he’ll make a hundred and twenty.

Q: At that time, during the 40’s, did you know that your parents were no longer at home? Did you know that they were no longer in Czechoslovakia? Did you have any knowledge about them?

A: It is very difficult to say. The general information was that Jews were sent to concentration camps, so we assumed that they were sent to concentration camps as well. Knowing my mother and my father, because of his profession in the army, I was more worried about my father than I was about my mother. I knew that my mother was very strong, had capabilities which many men didn’t have, such as…she understood electricity and could make repairs to many things. She was an excellent cook and she could teach cooking and so forth. She was a sportswoman. She was born in Vienna. She participated on the Austrian Olympic team. So there were all the reasons to believe that the Nazis might not touch her, in that respect. Nobody had the idea, certainly not at school till the very end, that…maybe we had an inkling that people were dying of hunger in concentration camps, but nobody…I had never heard of gas chambers or anything like that. If you remember, all this information was, if I remember correctly, not allowed to creep out to the general public, although the government knew about it. It was only within a few days after the Russians entered Prague that we got the first messages through the Czech government, because they had the first information, of lists of people that had returned from concentration camps and had survived, or were listed as alive when the Russians took over these camps and came to Prague. And these lists did not include my parents. They included my cousin Renee, who is alive to this day. She is very sick. She lives in New York in an old age home, “siyudi”, which has a convalescent area, because she, from the very time that she came from concentration camp, she has been suffering with her kidneys. I think she only has one kidney. So I knew that she had survived. Somehow, everybody said, well, it takes a long time for people to come back, so the Czech air force arranged for whoever wanted to go back – and a lot of us wanted to go back, especially those whose parents were still in Czechoslovakia – to get on the first airplane, to go back as soon as possible. And the Czech air force converted bombers from the Czech squadron and put seats into the bomb bays. They closed the bomb bay doors and they put seats instead of bombs and we would sit, I don’t know, maybe ten of us, with our suitcase, with one suitcase, and that’s the way we came back to Prague, very, very close to the end of the war.

Q: May?

A: May. Something like that. I don’t think we made May. I think it was the beginning of June. I know that the remnants of…I remember spending a few days in Prague before we went back to Brno. I remember being…there were no hotels open yet. We were put to live and sleep on benches in a school. So the school was closed, or this school was opened up as a home for us. And I remember we brought back, we were told that it was very important to come back with cigarettes, silk stockings, coffee. I think those were the three items. And I remember bringing coffee and cigarettes, especially cigarettes for our friends. And they would be exchanged for very valuable assistance which we could get, like money and so forth. And the first night, both my brother’s and my cigarettes and coffee were stolen from us whilst we were asleep in this school. And I remember already at that time going to the centre – I’ve forgotten the name of the place. It’s a building which was used by the returning people from concentration camps. And there were lists of people every day, additional lists, and notes. And we spent the first few days looking through these lists. And of course I met Renee, who, when I met her for the first time, she was on all fours, no hair. She had just recovered from paratyphus. And she knew nothing of our parents. She did know that both her parents died, both of them died after liberation. Her mother died of glass which was put into bread, and her father died of either overeating, or something like that, or died that he was so weak that the food which he received from the army…So they survived, not, of course, not in Terezin, but in concentration camps till the very end.

So the answer to this short question was, we had no idea, I would say, of gas chambers or anything like that. We realized that somebody who had been to concentration camps for three and a half, four years, nearly four years, would have a difficult time. And pictures were coming back of Bergen-Belsen, of the way the people found the camps.

Q: But when you went back to Czechoslovakia, that was definitely to meet your parents.

A: Oh yes. I spent…I haven’t stopped looking for my parents to this day because to this day, I didn’t believe that my mother somehow didn’t survive. Went to Russia, were taken to Siberia. Every possible, you know…We went to the station many times and we looked through these lists. And I think I got confirmation from the court only very late, most probably late in ’47 or ’48, not sooner, so that every film and old photographs which were published all over the place, long before television, of course. But films, there were films. We used to go and see films of people that were photographed coming from Poland and stations in Germany and so forth. To this day I look at all these documentaries. I go to Yad Vashem since this new…we went. And hours I would spend looking at pictures, looking at these very small pictures, if I could somewhere see either my father, my grandmother and my mother. I don’t know whether I have accepted it fully in the sense that…it was either something…it was not out of weakness. It was something which was either, you know, taken a few minutes and that was it. Same with my father, I’m sure. I never met the person who wrote, “The last time I saw your mother, saw Erna Meislova,” and the statement in court – for some reason or another, I did not go to meet these people. I did speak once to one of the men who claimed – I remember in Brno – that claimed to have been with my father in a camp, Piatsky, which is near Auschwitz, in a roll call, and he was standing next to my father. Something of this kind, because I know the places that they went to and where they were last reported to have been.

Q: You stayed in Prague?

A: No. I can’t remember whether…what happened was that there were no telephones and I knew the Sekals, I assumed that the Sekals would still be in Brno, near Brno, in (?), so I either wrote a card – I don’t have records of it – but we got on the train and went to Brno, Rudy and myself. And we arrived at the Sekal home, house, which is still in existence the way it was, built in the ‘30s.

Q: By that time you spoke Czech again?

A: Oh yes, yes. Not as well as the Czech Czechs, who hadn’t been out Czechoslovakia, but education at the school was of a very high standard, and we had Latin, Czech, French, and English, of course. So this all helped in a relatively high standard. We arrived at the Sekal home. They had a very big garden. There is a gate, which is open usually, already then was openable remotely from the house. And I had forgotten completely about our dog. We had a dog by the name of Emil. It was an Airedale. It is like a poodle – brown. It’s about this size. And this dog saw me – we are talking about six years – saw me, jumped at the gate and tried to get at me. And when I opened the gate he started licking me, not my brother, but me. And he went, he slept under my bed, wouldn’t come out from under my bed for six days, and died. So talk about dogs. He was something like eight, nine years old. He wasn’t yet ready to die, but he didn’t eat for a whole week. He wouldn’t move. I could pull him. I brought water. Wouldn’t touch anything. So that’s dogs for you.

So both my brother and I lived on the third floor of this house – we had a room together there. And among the first things that we did, we went into the garden with Tonda Sekal and started digging where he had buried, in 1942, all our family belongings – furniture, letters, clothing, money, jewellery. Everything was buried in the garden, in a concrete cave. We opened it. It had a slit in which he threw in letters which came in from England through the Red Cross, until they stopped coming. So all this was there, in perfect condition. In fact, my parents’ bedroom, which my father bought as a wedding gift from the Schoenbrun Palace in Vienna in 1926 – they sold, because they were bankrupt, the Habsburgs. He bought this bedroom and it was an antique, very, very valuable piece of furniture, which had a double bed, posted bed, and cupboard, a makeup table, and a table where we used to learn Hebrew, with two chairs, at least, which were all upholstered with golden type of things. I sold this set in order to buy a ticket, a boat ticket, for my brother in 1946 to go to the United States. But everything was there. The jewellery was there. To give you an example, I found a ticket to the tailor, my father’s tailor, that he had ordered in 1942 two suits to be made. I went to the tailor. The tailor remembered my father. I said, “My father used to come here.” He said, “Not only did he come here. I have two suits here. And by the looks of you, I can make them to fit you.” He made them to fit me, and when I came to pick them up and I wanted to pay him, he said, “Are you absolutely crazy? Your father paid me and it has been with me for four years, the money. Can you imagine how many times he has paid for this suit with the money being with me?” So that is a typical example of some of the Czech, the way the Czechs behaved. And not only the Sekals, who basically made it possible for us to come back. We didn’t move back into our apartment for two reasons. A) When we came to the apartment we found that two Jewish ladies, who had been to concentration camps, had moved into this apartment which was free, because all the Jewish apartments were taken over by the Germans, either by the German occupation people or by “Sudetendeustche”, who moved into the cities. And they, of course, ran away immediately after…when the Russians came in, they ran to Austria, wherever, Germany, and so these apartments were free and people who were coming back from concentration camps just moved into empty apartments which were usually empty with furniture. So when we came back, we found two ladies, unrelated – one of them, Mrs. Ritter, Rittrova, and her son, who later came from…later came to live with her. He now lives here in Israel. We met recently after sixty years, I think. He is in a moshav. And Mrs. Ritter then went to Kibbutz Ginegar, went to Israel, went to Palestine, and then when I started going to university…just before Rudy went to the United States, they agreed – it was a five-room apartment – that we would move in and live in one of the rooms. (end of tape)

A: So we were back in Czechoslovakia and we got all our things back, parents’ things back. My brother was off to the United States, and the reason being that he went and I didn’t go, although the plan originally was that we should both go, was very simple. My uncle, my mother’s brother, youngest brother, Kurt, in 1946 was not in a position...by 1946 I had a “stipendium”. I could go the “Technion” or to the university to study engineering, which was my plan, to study aeronautical engineering, at no charge. In other words, I could afford it, but after corresponding with my Uncle Kurt, it became obvious that he was not able to support sending us to university. So after an exchange of letters, I said, “In view of the fact that I can study here,” and I couldn’t ensure the same conditions for Rudy, for my brother Rudy, I arranged for him, I agreed that he should go alone to the United States, where he had been ever since. As I mentioned, we sold the bedroom suite, the Schoenbrun bedroom suite, and got him a ticket by boat to the United States, where he was supposed to live with my uncle and aunt, but they didn’t have enough room, so they got him a job to live with a widow who had five enormous dogs – they were at least half as tall as he was – and his job was to look after these dogs, take them for walks – that was apart from school. So he went to high school and he joined the US Air Force when he was eighteen. Whether he just wanted to be a pilot or whether it was...at that time it was compulsory to go into the army. But anyhow, he joined the air force and he served as a flying crew member. He was a radar and gun operator. He got thrown the pilots’ course apparently because of some...

Q: Medical reason?

A: No, not medical, but I think it was something to do with Judaism, with anti-Semitism. I think so. I can’t remember anymore. He gave evidence – maybe it was mentioned at some time. But I don’t remember the real story. Anyhow, he landed up flying B-29s as a gunner, radar operator in the Korean War and after the Korean War he got a GI plan to go – which is free education, university education – and became an electronics engineer, which from there he went to work at Douglas Aircraft as a flight test engineer during the development of the DC-7 and perhaps even the DC-8, and finally landed up...he married, has three daughters. His wife passed away from cancer at a very, very early age. He remarried and he, from Douglas, he went to work for Litton Industries, also on the aviation side, became program manager. He is now retired. He is suffering with Parkinson’s, but he is all there mentally, and he lives in Oak Park, which is part of Los Angeles outskirts, and we see him quite often. We go out there more than he comes here because of his...because of his Parkinson’s. And his daughters are well-off, and we are very close. Today it is very easy on the telephone. So that is my brother.

As far as I am concerned, I had to do my “matura” again, as I mentioned, because English matric of the Northwestern Polytechnic wasn’t of a high enough standard to be accepted by the Czech schooling system. And I went to the Benisch College for Mechanical Engineering and studied there till the winter of 1947. After the UN vote in the United Nations – the details of dates are very uncertain – a certain Gut Pollack – I remember his name very clearly – a Czech who lived on a kibbutz in Israel, was in the Palmach maybe, I don’t know. He came from the Czech...it was most probably the office of the Jewish Agency in Prague, which was run by Uberall (sp?). Ehud Avriel became the ambassador. He worked with him and he came to the university in Brno, met me and said, “You have an aviation background.” So I said, “How do you know?” He said, “We know.” So to this day I don’t know how they found out that I was interested in aviation. “I want you to find students at the university and at the technical school, technical college, who would be ready to join the Israeli air force for six months on a voluntary basis, first of all to undergo training as a pilot for the Israeli air force and then come to Israel for six months, and we will guarantee to send you back so that you can finish your education,” because aeronautical engineering was a higher degree than mechanical engineering in those days. So I agreed to look for people, and for the next two or three months I couldn’t find, except some Bulgarian, Jewish Bulgarian students. The only person that I knew of in Brno who may be interested – it isn’t exactly that – the only person that I knew in Brno was Joe Plachek, who was with me in the Czech school, went to school, was younger, went to the same class as my brother, and he was in the air training corps, so I knew that he may be interested. So somehow, it is a long story. I got him to come to the medical, so the only two people who came from Brno who were not Bulgarian were Joe and myself. We passed the medical exams at the air force medical board in Prague and we found ourselves early in 1948 as among twenty-two, I think we were twenty-two, Czech – two or three were of Polish origin, maybe two – a Czech pilots’ course for the Israeli air force, at a place called Olomotz, which was the sergeant pilots’ flying school of the Czech Air Force. The Czech Air Force, like the RAF, had sergeant pilots and officer pilots. So both Joe and I finished the flying course at Olomotz. On the 12th of October, 1948 – it was the day before Yom Kippur. In the meantime, the Israelis sent another twenty or so pilots who were already pilots, civil pilots, to the same school, so we were about forty Jewish, Israeli volunteers at this flying school. And on the 12th of October, 1948 I went to the commanding officer, (?) – he was a wing commander – and I said to him, “Tomorrow is Yom Kippur. There is no synagogue in Olomotz,” although there were many prior to the war. We knew of no Jewish families in Olomotz. I asked him to give me transportation to go to the Czech brigade which was being trained not far away, about a hundred kilometers away from Olomotz, to give us a truck to take us forty to be able to spend Yom Kippur in Verkascerna (sp?) – that’s the name of the place. And on the 12th of October, 1949, in the evening after the meal, we walked around and with a friend we walked to the women’s quarters and there, through the...the camp was built in a village, Sudeten village, which was completely left by the Germans, so it was turned into a military camp. There were about two thousand volunteers there from Czechoslovakia, and through the window of a kitchen where was the bedroom of these women, I saw Martha for the first time. I didn’t know what her name was, and so forth, but through a friend of mine, I found out that tomorrow she would be at the synagogue and that it is Yom Kippur, and I arranged with Joe to...we prepared some sandwiches for ourselves and climbed into a tank, into a T-34 Russian tank, which was used by the Czechs to teach the brigade tankists, which was right opposite the place where the synagogue was, in this...it wasn’t a permanent synagogue. It was a place which was used on Yom Kippur. So we sat there in the tank, looking out, eating our sandwiches and waiting for the people to come out of the synagogue. When they came out, out came Martha in a military, heavy – it was already cold. I think it had snowed already. It was beginning of October. And she was in this military overcoat. And I approached her and I walked with her nearly the whole day until we were leaving in the evening to go back. And I discovered it was her birthday, the 13th of October, on Yom Kippur, which happens every nineteen years. And we decided we would correspond. I gave her a present because she had no relatives by this time. Her parents were not alive anymore. And we met seven more times, and on the seventh time, we married in Kosice, on the seventh time we met. By this time it was the 30th of November, 1948. I got permission from the commanding officer and a ticket to go to visit her, and we married in Kosice, where she lived with her sister and her brother-in-law.

Q: You were twenty years old.

A: I was twenty, yes. But I had spent already ten years alone basically. So compared to the Czechs that I went to school with after the war, I was at least ten years older than they were, experience-wise. In every respect. So we married, we spent our honeymoon in the Tetra mountains. We went to Prague. It was my third visit to Prague. First was before we left for England, second was upon my return. This was my third visit. I hadn’t been to Prague. I’d been to other places, but I hadn’t been to Prague. And shortly after that, within one month, we came back to Brno, we lived in the apartment, in my apartment. And by the end of December, must have been Christmas-time, Martha left with the brigade by train for Israel, with the Czech brigade. I was kept by the Czech air force, by the Israeli air force, in Czechoslovakia with the intent, together with Joe Plachek, who later became Joe Alon, and a boy, another pilot by the name of Feder, who was a very good pilot. I finished the course as the best student, although I didn’t expect to be the best student. In fact, it was a big surprise to me when I was called by the commanding officer, who called in myself and another Israeli, Ben-Haim, Blackie – we were called in by the commanding officer and usually the commanding officer called people before they were thrown off the course. So we were expecting, both of us, to be thrown off the course, and instead of being thrown off the course, we were told, I was told that I was the best student in the Czech group and he was the best student in the Israeli group. We were chosen, the three of us, were chosen to fly the last three Spitfires to Israel. By this time, the problem with Slansky and with the fact that the Czechs who were going to Israel, instead of supporting communism, they were reporting terrible things about the communist system, so the problem of the anti-Israeli situation was changing and these three aircraft were never delivered, and we came to Israel via Constanta by train, all the way by train to Constanta, and then by, I think she was called the “Transylvania” or something like this – a ZIM vessel, a new ZIM vessel, which brought us to Haifa.

Q: That was already ’49.

A: This was February the 26th, 1949. My wife waited for me in uniform in Haifa. From there we went to, all of us, the whole group, all the pilots, went to the camp opposite Netanya – Beit Lid. And I remember spending the first night in an ex-military British army hut. We had at least twenty beds in line there and I slept in this narrow bed the first night with my wife, with everybody together. In the morning we got up early and I sat under an orange tree, which was right next to the hut, and finished off most probably enough oranges to be sick, because we had no...So that is my memory of the first day. We then moved, we were then sent to Machane Ariel, which was in Jaffa, and we were expecting to start flying. It was the last two weeks of the war, and instead of being sent to fly, we were sent, because we spoke good English, to a meteorological course in the air force ran by Smoky Simon’s wife – I have forgotten her name for a moment – Myra, who ran a meteorological course for a number of us who spoke good enough English, because all education was in English. And here I met Moshe Tzikal, who was, if you remember I mentioned when we were in Llanwrtyd Wells, his mother was the only one that was in Llanwrtyd Wells. And he was an instructor in the Israeli air force in meteorology. When we completed the course we worked a few weeks in meteorology, and then the “Machal” pilots were leaving, the non-Jewish pilots were leaving Israel.

Q: The Americans?

A: Americans, Canadians, some English, and so forth were leaving. They didn’t have enough pilots in 100 Squadron, which was a light aircraft squadron. There were enough pilots for the Messerschmitts and for the Spitfires, but there weren’t enough pilots for the light aircraft, s I was transferred to 100 Squadron. I came to Tel Nof and the commanding officer said to me, “You are going to first of all learn where the borders are, a familiarization flight, and the pilot is waiting next to this Piper Cub outside to fly with you.” I came to the aircraft and there I see John Ehrman, ex-RAF, who matriculated in Llanwrtyd Wells, the first cousin of Ruth Federman, who was actually, my first flight all over Israel was with him. I was stationed, all of us were stationed in Beer Sheva. We were the air force unit responsible for the whole Negev. I was among the first to land in Eilat, in Ein Radian (sp?) and all the various small fields which were in the Negev. We were sort of watching...it was mainly reconnaissance flights in the Negev. And finally by the end of the year...in the meantime, the commanding officer, who was an American rabbi by the name of Barak Bernstein became sick in Beer Sheva, and by sheer chance, by a very unusual method, I became the commanding officer, without rank basically. I was a pilot. We hadn’t really got ranks. And how did it happen? We were sitting in the operations room and next door was the teleprinter, which was a very noisy machine and we were sitting drinking coffee or whatever, and the teleprinter started like a machine gun, you know? Nobody got up. Finally I got up and there was a message in English. It said the following, “The first pilot officer reading this message is now in command. Signed Wing Commander Bill Katz,” who was one of the Americans in charge. So I became in charge of this unit and soon thereafter they opened the flying school, they decided to open the first flying school in Israel, in Kfar Sirkin. And we went back to Tel Nof. I worked for a short time as a mechanic because I was talented well-minded. Joe as well. We worked as mechanics on Harvard aircraft, which were the aircraft which we were to fly. It was decided that since we had flown light aircraft for such a long time that they wanted to give us a refresher course, and not to start flying school on Stiermans light aircraft, but to start on Harvard. So the first three Harvards that were flown to Sirkin since the British left was Les Easterman, was George Lichter and Bill Lanson. And I was in one and Joe was in one. Feder was in one and I was in the third. The threesome that were originally chosen to fly the Spitfires flew the first Harvards into the flying school. The flying school – we were the first originally recognized Israeli flying course to get wings, somewhere here. And the wings parade, we were given wings by Ben-Gurion. The chief of staff was Yigal Yadin. The air force commander was Aharon Remez at the time. It was a big do, there was a big flypass. Many aircraft flew past. The instructors flew. And only later were the pilots that were in Czechoslovakia in the other course, got their wings a few weeks before, were called “Course Minus One”. Then there was a course which included Danny Shapira – I think they were called “Minus Two” and Mottie Hod. But we were the course that was called “Number One Course”, although we were not the first to receive wings in Israel. We finished the course and I finished top of the class. It was decided that because of lack of instructors and some of the instructors were going back to America and England, that I would go onto a pilot instructors’ course, which was organized in Sirkin and the instructors were George Lichter, Les Easterman, all the senior “Machal” pilots. I finished the course and it was during this course or at that time when all the pilots of the course went to Ramat David to fly on fighter squadrons, went to an OTU. We didn’t go to an OTU, so as we wanted to fly Spitfires, they brought a Spitfire for the instructors to fly in Sirkin. Following the course I instructed the Course Number Two, having finished the course. Course Number Two was still in the final stages of their flying training on Harvards, so I instructed...and Benny Peled, who then became Air Force Commander, among others, was one of my students of Course Number Two. Following that, Shaya Schwartzman, Shaya Gazit, who was then OC of the elementary flying school, left and I was made commander of the elementary flying school. I spent some time there. I was sent to England to an instructors’ instructors’ course. We are talking about now the winter of 1951 and I participated and finished the course also as top student, came back to Israel, instructed an instructors’ course and was chosen to go and set up a Mosquito aircraft fighter bomber squadron. So first I went to a conversion course to (?) in Sirkin. From there I went to Hatzor, “Kanaf Arba”, which was called “Kastina” at the time, and got a conversion course in 109 Squadron, which flew Mosquitoes, Mach Sixes. And I got established the first Israeli squadron building was built and we laid the cornerstone for Squadron 110, which was established as the first Israeli night fighters’ squadron, and it also became the OTU for pilots converting to Mosquitoes. When Johnny Harvey, who was test pilot – and Englishman, very famous English fighter pilot who was test pilot for the Israeli air force in Chateau Dunne (sp?) in France on Mosquitoes which were still not delivered. He was killed in a test flight, so I was taken off the squadron and sent to France to do the test flying and to ferry the Mosquitoes to Israel. So I did this till the end of 1954, when I left the Israeli air force and became a test pilot for the Ministry of Defense and worked for the Ministry of Defense, organizing...was sent to Bedek Aviation at that time, Bedek Aircraft, Bedek Aviation I think it was called, as the Ministry of Defense test pilot, to organize the transfer of thirty Spitfires to Burma, which were sold to Burma for a few ships of rice, if I am not mistaken. So I test-flew these thirty Spitfires and by this time I wanted to et back to school, and with the help of the air force commander Dan Tolkowski, who always wanted me to come back to the air force because he believed that I could eventually...he actually came to our house at No. 62 and tried to convince Martha for me to stay in the air force because I would one day perhaps make air force commander. I didn’t want to stay in the air force. So he was very, very instrumental in organizing a “stipendium” to go to London to study aeronautical engineering at London University, which was a “stipendium” provided by Mr. Gestetner of the famous printing people, who was also, by sheer coincidence, connected with Fritz Gross, who had designed, as an architect, his home. So there was a connection there. By this time we had two girls – Evie, the older one, who is still alive, and Orit, who passed away when she was thirty-three from melanoma. We moved to London and I worked, I got a job with the help of the Ministry of Defense as a local employee in the Ministry of Defense purchasing mission in London at the Israeli embassy. As a local employee the money that I received, the wages that I received were not enough to keep us four, so I worked as a test pilot here and there for DeHavillands, for some of the people who were selling aircraft to Israel and so forth, and I did some ferry flights, so I earned additional money. Within about a year, they decided they wanted me to run...I was then number two. I worked under Sam Barak, Sam Burke, who was an English, very well-known aeronautical engineer who worked for the Israeli air force, who was in charge of the department also for the Israeli Air Force and also for Bedek Aviation, was a Ministry of Defense facility. I got the job and was paid Israeli conditions, so that I was a full member of the defense mission there. By 1958, the Israeli Ministry of Defense decided they wanted to build jet aircraft in Israel for jet training. So because of my technical background and my test-flying background, Al Schwimmer came with the air force team and we were sent all over England and France to check out which would be the best aircraft to manufacture in Israel. We decided on the Fallennet (sp?) in England, but the British didn’t give us an export license, so finally the Fuga was chosen on one of my recommendations, and it was decided that the Fuga would be manufactured in Israel. So the Ministry of Defense, together with Bedek Aviation, decided and asked me to go to a test pilots’ course, an official test pilots’ course, together with Lieutenant Colonel Danny Shapira, who was not an engineer, and they would accept only engineering people. So I was asked, because he was a very famous and a very good pilot – he is a very famous and good pilot – I was asked if I could support him, if I would be alongside him, then they would allow him to go onto the course. So we finished this course sometime in 1959 and we came back. During this time the family moved to Paris and they lived in Paris for a certain time.

An interesting point was – just an interesting point – one day during the winter it was very cold. I came back late from night flying and I see a lady trying to park a Rolls Royce outside Paul de Mer No. 57, where we lived on the third floor, and I saw that she couldn’t park the car. She was in a big mink coat and so forth. I helped her to park her car and then went upstairs and I told Martha I helped this lady who lived on the second floor to park the car, and she said, “Don’t you know that’s this famous star? She is now looking after dogs in France.” A blonde.

Q: Brigitte Bardot.

A: Brigitte Bardot. She lived in the same house. I didn’t know. Anyhow, when we finished the course I went for a short time to the south of France to fly with the French at the flight test centre at Easter, which is near Marseille, and did some test flying on the new engine for the Mirage aircraft, came back to Israel and established a flight test centre. I set up the first Israeli flight test centre, with all the most modern instrumentation in preparation for the first Fuga that was to be built in Israel. And of course I flew the first Fuga that was built in Israel, and many more after that. And by 1964 we had quite a large flight test department and at that time Bedek was expanding to Israel Aircraft Industries and they wanted managers for other plants and Al Schwimmer wanted me to take over one of the new plants that they were establishing and I was very much against doing administrative work. During the six years at Israel Aircraft Industries we did some very fantastic developments – missiles, air-to-air, the Arava was set up, the BK-101, which was Schwimmer’s...Schwimmer, who definitely ranks among some of the greatest aviation men in history, no question about it, came up with the idea of jet executive aircraft, which was never considered. He came to an agreement with Lear and we built a mock-up. We brought the Strata cruiser, we brought the Strata cruiser into the air force, which is the first four-engine transport, so that aircraft wouldn’t have to stop in Greece and Italy. The Nord aircraft would have to stop delivery of military equipment to Israel, was always delicately investigated by the Italians and so forth. So like this we could fly from England non-stop, or from France, non-stop to Israel, wouldn’t have to stop in Greece or Italy on the way. So all these developments, so by 1964 I decided to go...by this time the Royal Aeronautical Society, because of some patents which I had developed and were bought by the US government and used on the first manned satellite, which flew around the globe, was using a patent which I had developed for Israeli aircraft, was used for the control of the satellite. I decided to set up an engineering company and I was very, very interested during this whole time. We were talking about developing airports in Israel. I was on various committees. I was a member of the national...I’ve forgotten what the name of it was. An organization which was organized from all the senior aviation people to advise the Minister of Transport, who didn’t have to be a specialist, which, when Ezer Weizmann became the Minister of Transport, this National Council for Civil Aviation – this is what it was called – was shut down because Ezer said, “I don’t need advice. I know enough. I don’t need advice.” It’s about time it was reinstituted now. Anyhow, I liked the airport issue and I established most probably the world’s first engineering company which would do nothing else but aviation. In other words, it would design parts for airplanes, it would design airports and it would do consulting work for people who were interested in establishing aviation facilities. Usually all these jobs were done either by architectural firms or runways were designed by people designed roads. This was the first time when under one roof – today there are many like that. And I specialized in the airport, which I do to this very day. We have worked all over the world. We were one of the master planners of which was at that time in the ‘60s considered to be the largest airport in the United States. I participated and came up with a very unique plan for what was to be called the first intercontinental airport in the United States, which was never built because of ecological problems. We designed the second international airport of Paraguay. We made plans for numerous airports in the United States, and in Athens we were in a joint-venture team for the new Athens airport, together with Howard Needlesberg and Bergendorf of New York, which had five thousand engineers, but they were spread in all the disciplines and we were specialists for airports, so they joint-ventured with us for this new airport. We’ve consulted on numerous airports in Central America, in Panama, the first offshore...And finally, in 1965, the present president of Israel, Shimon Peres, asked us to see if we could find a solution for the closing down of Sde Dov and finding a new airport instead of Sde Dov for the military. And civil. And we checked out nineteen different solutions and finally we recommended the construction of an offshore airport, which I hope within the next few years will be the satellite to Ben-Gurion, like you mentioned Luton-Gatwick and so forth, to Ben-Gurion. And it will become the international airport from Europe and it will cause much less interference.

Q: Last sentence before we finish?

A: Last sentence. I am very keen on passing to the next generation. My son-in-law is a pilot, my grandson flies F-16s in the Israeli Air Force. I have always been very supportive of the experience gained in our lives, both the experience as growing up without the support of parents, to the experience of taking care of the family members, keeping a good relationship in the family. And above all, not holding on to the experience that we have, but to pass it on freely, without charge, without being forced to do so. Enjoy passing on the experience that people have. And I think that the effort that Yad Vashem is doing should be taken much further than it is at the present moment. I think that among the Jewish people there were many who did no less than the non-Jews, that most of them did it for payments, that helped other Jews who were not members of their family. We have not yet, in spite of my efforts to support a similar reward to those who helped other Jews all over the world, not only from Nazism. And above all is finally, which I am trying to do, is to recognize that we, the “kinder”, whatever we have done in our lives, however well we’ve done – and a lot of them have done very well and have come to very high positions – we are being considered sometimes as survivors of those who passed away, who were murdered in concentration camps. We seem to forget the real heroes, which were the parents. And I am doing my utmost to convince the government of Czechoslovakia to establish a memorial to those parents who had the audacity and the courage to send their children into an unknown country and go through the Holocaust twice – once when their children were being bombed in London and all over England whilst they were still not in Czechoslovakia forced to wear the Star of David. And the second time, of course, when they went to the gas chambers.

A: Thank you.

Q: Thank you very much.