Juraj Gross

"Because we came originally from a bigger town - Košice - there was also a Jewish religious community, where mostly elderly people were meeting around the genuine Jewish kitchen where they could fulfill the kashrus meals. Only people for whom this was an important issue were going there; other people would visit the community only to socialize. There were years (around 1968) when the atmosphere was a little freer, when the younger people could join the community. Despite the fact that many of us came from families where Judaism was almost dead, we still were able to acknowledge the tradition, music, and what it is like to be a Jew. Only few families cultivated Jewish consciousness. In big cities with large assimilation, Judaism was often being forgotten. Other people were afraid of being prosecuted by the regime. I participated in the Prague meeting of the so called ´Children of Maislovka club´"

"Why did we leave? Me and my wife didn’t have any economical problems. We both had a decent job and a nice apartment. But there was one problem: although we were not religious, our parents cared a lot about who we saw, who we socialized with. We also experienced different kinds of anti-Semitism. Let me give an example: In 1979 I lived and worked in Nové Zámky town. One day I was passing by the school in the afternoon and I saw parents gathered in front of the school, presumably waiting for their kids to come back from the trip. I asked them if they are expecting their children to return from a trip. But they said they were not waiting for the kids to return from the trip, apparently they heard some rumor about some Jews from Poland who were visiting several schools dressed like the ambulance men, and were taking the kids away under the pretext that they need to draw their blood for some tests. But in reality they wanted to use their blood - the blood of the Christians - as an ingredient for the matzo bread (a kind of cracker-like flatbread). The very next day I was telling this funny story at my work and my boss, an engineer and a well-educated woman, also believed it was truth. This happened in 1979. If I would have seen it personally, I would never believe it myself too. Two weeks before this happened we visited our parents in Košice town and there I heard this "funny story" for the first time and I took it as a good joke. But when I saw it two weeks later in Nové Zámky it gave me the idea of emigrating. When will they accept us, the Jews, as completely equal? We only wanted for our unborn children to live in a society that will accept them unconditionally. We knew that we will be under toughest conditions, that life in Israel isn’t easy, and that there can be a war from time to time."

"I was the system programmer in the DSM language. Those were large computers, we can even say they were the mammoths of all computers. The whole world is transferring to the NT line computers nowadays. It used to be that four computers filled the whole room completely; today we can fit three hundred small computers in there. Each one of them deals with a different kind of application. I don’t intend to learn all the new things anymore, because before I could do that I’d be retired. I don’t like the new programming so much anyway. When the old computers will be ready to retire, I will go too."

"I was born in Košice. During the years from 1964 to 1968, I studied in Prague. I have beautiful memories of Prague from this period of time. I and my wife decided to emigrate in 1980. At the time, we didn’t think we would be able to reunite with our parents again. We were very surprised, just like many others, when the iron curtain fell down nine years later and we could freely come back."