Daniel Mayer

“So I signed the cooperation. The other thing is to know what information you can give without harming someone else. There was practically no personal information. They were more interested when there was a trip somewhere, although I didn’t go on those much... compared to others. Say the chairman of the council went a lot more often than me, to represent the Jewish community. They were more interested in what had happened there, who had been there. What they had spoken about, what they had wrote about. Of course, the materials were freely available, anyone could find out about it. I knew that they had received the information before me, that someone had passed it on a day or two earlier. I know that now, let’s not paint ourselves pretty pictures. There was information which was freely available - I think I couldn’t have harmed anyone with that... I have a lot of acquaintances who have seen their files, and we have remained friends, it’s okay, and we’ve known each other since the Seventies. If someone had... But others played their parts. Unfortunately, I haven’t seen my file, neither has my wife. Recently, they wrote to my wife from the Ministry of Interior to say that her file had been discarded sometime around the 8th of December 1989. So it doesn’t exist. I didn’t even try to search, because if her file was discarded, mine was too. But a lot of my acquaintances saw their files. ... They also tried for me to be a member of some group, for instance of the Jewish Congress. I told them: ‘I would be very suspicious, the only one from Eastern Europe, the only one who wants to work in the committee, it would be suspicious, it wouldn’t do any good.’ ... So they’d see through it, it’d leak out. So there was this kind of pressure for me to cooperate with the intelligence service. So they accepted that. They couldn’t say a word.”

“One time after Shavuot, I received a call from Mr Jung from the Ministry of Culture; he was the secretary for our Jewish community and among other things head of the people’s militia at the ministry. So he phoned me up and said: ‘Mr Rabbi, could you come over for a talk?’ - ‘Yes, of course.’ - ‘And Mr Rabbi, do you write your sermons?’ - ‘Yes, of course; I don’t remember them, so it’s safer to write them down.’ - ‘And could you bring with you the sermon you had for Shavuot?’ - ‘But of course.’ - It was Wednesday I think, so I went to Mr Jung, we had coffee and a cigarette, I gave him the sermon, he started reading... ‘Mr Jung, sorry for interrupting, but why did you invite me here? Coffee, cigarettes, fine. But apart from that, why?’ - ‘Oh, it’s okay, I just wanted to be in the know.’ - ‘And the sermon, is there something wrong in it? You summoned me here just because of the sermon? I don’t want to know who.’ - ‘No, no.’ Finally he admitted that they had been informed that I had had a Zionistic sermon. - ‘And is there anything Zionistic there?’ - ‘No, no.’ So we finished the cigarette and I went home. Fun things like that also happened.”

“From 1970, following the death of Rabbi Feder, the Prague Jewish Community had no one. There was one adept, he also studied in Budapest, but then he left to England and stayed there. I can’t blame him, because the authorities put him under enormous pressure. So he stayed in England. He was supposed to take up the function in 1972 or thereabouts. From then until 1984 there was no rabbi. Not in Bohemia, not in Prague. In Slovakia they had Mr Rabbi Katz. Not Eliah Katz, he moved to Israel in 1968 or 1969 and he was head rabbi in Be’er Sheva, but there was also Isidor Katz. They named him rabbi instead of Eliah Katz. He was rabbi in Bratislava until the early 1980s, but then he died and there was no rabbi in Slovakia until the revolution.”

“Then there were some conflicts with a Soviet student in Budapest. Presumably it passed on further up through the Czechoslovak and Soviet embassies. I was summoned, so of course if you wanted to complete the school... Simply, I was against the Soviet army and its methods. He told on me at the Soviet embassy, I know that now. The former student who denounced me is also here in Israel. I haven’t seen him, I don’t know where he lives. So I signed the cooperation.”