Giora Solar

“When I went to Bardejov because of UNESCO work for the first time, I stayed in one very nice hotel. Then they were supposed to come and pick me up, and as I was waiting, I noticed that everything outside was beautiful. They had very nice houses. After I returned home, I asked my mom: 'Why did you leave?' My mom told me: 'We have gone through the war and Auschwitz, we came back home and the communists took over. We said to each other: What if all is going to repeat just under a different name? That's why we'd decided to leave.' And I asked her why they left to Israel. In September 1949, Israel existed for only about one year, that's why I wondered why they didn't go to America, Canada, Australia, where our family was. She told me that she considered Israel to be the only place in the whole world, where they wouldn't hear: 'You don't belong here.'”

“It was something beautiful that suddenly it opened, that it was possible. We thought that everything could change. Who knew what would happen twenty years after. For example, my parents immediately travelled to Czechoslovakia back then. Dubček was an amazing name for us. We were full of hopes, we read about that. We didn't have a television back then. The TV appeared in Israel I guess in 1973 or 74. We didn't see it, but we read about everything what was happening in Prague, or even when the Russians came.”