Michael Lax

“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.”

“After I graduated, the whole of our Jewish community went to the Myslivna in Brno and celebrated that the war had ended here in Israel. I brought a little Israeli flag with me, and we celebrated. Then they summoned Mum to the police and told her they’d seen a Zionist group in the Myslivna and that I should watch out because I wouldn’t be allowed to study, that they wouldn’t let me study at university because those things aren’t done. Mum was frightened – of course she wanted me to study. So in the end I was accepted to the University of Economics, but only to study political economic, nothing else. I studied in 1968, the first year of university, in Prague. That was the time of Prague Spring, and I attended all the rallies.”