Michael Lax

“Our relatives in Israel came to visit us after fifteen years, and that led to the decision: we’ll apply for permission to emigrate. Of course they applied when Mum came home, but we were refused. My parents appealed the decision, but were refused again – that it wasn’t in the interests of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic for us to leave. Then they told Mum at the police station: ‘We’d let you adults go, but we’ll keep the children here because we’ve invested into them, studies and education. We won’t give them to Ben Gurion,’ they said.”

“It was conflicted. At school we had the Pioneers and Communist indoctrination telling us that religion was the opium of the people, we heard all of that. But we were little children, so we believed that as well, in a conflicted kind of way. We attended religious instruction and then went to Pioneer meetings. We had all the Pioneer events, the red scarves, the promise – I can remember the Pioneer’s promise to this day because the indoctrination is so strong that you remember it. ‘I, little Pioneer of the People’s Democratic Republic of Czechoslovakia, promise in front of all my comrades that I will study so as to become a useful citizen of my homeland.’ That’s it. It sticks in your mind, even when you grow old. So we had all of that. We thought that Socialism is so-and-so, that Gagarin is so-and-so... We celebrated it all, there were those celebrations. My parents didn’t even talk into it.”

“It took a while, due to the bureaucracy and so on, but we received permission to emigrate in the summer. We were supposed to get our passports and so on. We received notification, then it was 21 August, and the cage closed again. There were tanks in the streets, and so on, so we thought we wouldn’t make it any more; so while the occupation was going on, I travelled to Prague to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, past Hradčany Square. I asked if we would get those passports. They told me everything was business as usual, that we’d get the passports. And we did, and we emigrated in October 1968, legally, with emigration passports, while most people fled [unofficially] at the time. We came here legally. Not that there was a difference at all, because we weren’t allowed to visit the Czech Republic until after the revolution.”

“I can’t say we had any trouble. We grew up as Jews, everyone knew it, in our neighbourhood, in the whole vicinity; I was the only Jew in my class. My parents knew of other Jews who didn’t profess the fact after the war, they lived in the vicinity. Most of the people in the vicinity did own up to being Jewish. But my parents considered it important, they sent me to lessons of religious instruction by Doctor Feder. He brought us up, told us fables from the Bible, taught us a bit of Hebrew. He wasn’t a great teacher, he kind of mumbled it to himself, so we listened and repeated it, so we didn’t learn any Hebrew at all because we just repeated everything after him. We liked being with him, we celebrated the Jewish feasts at his place and went to the synagogue with our parents for feast days. So the Jewish community in Brno was active.”