Michael Lax

“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.”

“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.”