Avraham Talmi

“I felt more antisemitism when I was in the Czechoslovak foreign army. For example, for Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, we were on the front, sleeping together with the aspirant school. I had a good friend who was a professor at the American university in Beirut. We didn’t make friends with him until there. At nine p.m. we heard the radio, BBC London, our president wished Jewish soldiers a happy new year and that we’d live to see our homeland again and reunite with our family. All of a sudden, I hear a priest from the Catholic faculty in Olomouc, saying: ‘Our president has no business talking just about Jews.’ So I reckoned: ‘There you go, you say there isn’t any antisemitism, and what’s this, this isn’t antisemitism?’ And he said ‘Don’t take that seriously.’”

“I was on the Atlantic, and so [when] we arrived, the English knew it. Palestine was still under English rule. The secret service knew there were illegal immigrants on the way, so they prepared a big ship that sailed from Toulon and Saigon, the Patria it was called, it could fit three thousand people. Our transports were three ships, that was about three thousand emigrants, they were loaded straight on to the Patria. We arrived in Haifa.”

“We were there for a year, the youth, the Czechoslovak youth got in touch with Beneš’s government in London, they reached out to the British government and obtained permission for the emigrants in Mauricius to be able to volunteer into the Czechoslovak army. So there were eighty of us boys wo volunteered and left Mauricius and went to South Africa. There, the English gave us uniforms, and Mr Kováč, who was a pilot, was chief of this group, and I was his deputy. The English made me an acting sergeant. So we came to Suez, there we were welcomed by a Czechoslovak officer, and so we who were already in the army, we went to Haifa. There was an anti-air unit in Haifa, and those who weren’t there, say me as a new recruit, we went to Sidi Bishr, near Alexandria, where they had a boot camp.”