“Everything changed on the day of the Soviet occupation. I was just coming from Yugoslavia. I came to Žilina, Slovakia. My parents did not know then where I was. I came that night, I came with the last train from Hungary which crossed the border before they closed it because of the occupation. I came to Prague only one week after the occupation. I came to the main train station where my parents were waiting for me, as the Russians were everywhere. I arrived and I said: I will not stay here, I am going to go to Israel. It was a serious decision, I should remind you I was quite young, I was eighteen at the time, just after finishing high school. My parents tried to persuade me not to go. They said my father was old, that it is not the right thing for them to travel far. I stayed almost another year in Czechoslovakia. I started to study at university, I studied one year at the mathematics faculty. I kept thinking all that time about going to Israel. My parents tried to persuade me to go somewhere else. (…) The only place where I would not be a foreigner would be Israel [I thought]. In 1969 a youth group was formed in the Prague Jewish community which went to Israel with a six-week programme. Four weeks working in a kibbutz, one week lectures about Israel and one week travelling. Our friends, who were there since 1968, waited for us in the airport. (…) I asked immediately: ‘How much is a stipend here?’ And he said: ‘I knew you would not want to go back.’ I was one of the minority which stayed there, the majority returned.”
“My mother came from a religious family. They kept the Jewish belief very strongly when she was small. She was born in Michalovce, Slovakia, grew up in Žilina, and then married in Prague. She comes from the Landesmann family which went to Slovakia from Moravia at the time of the Familianten Law. (…) During the Second World War she fled from Slovakia to Hungary, but she was captured there. She was transported from Hungary to Auschwitz. Then from Auschwitz to a labour camp in Bernartice. Jewishness was always remembered in our home. My father was remembering his experiences as a soldier. My mother was talking about the war, too – not so much about Auschwitz, but she often talked about how she was crossing the border from Slovakia to Hungary and about the labour camp. They also kept telling me: ‘The reason why you are the only child is that your mother was not healthy enough. She barely gave birth to you, she spent her pregnancy in bed.’ I was never ashamed to be Jewish, I always proudly wore the David star around Prague. I never felt antisemitism there. In Bohemia, that is. In Slovakia it was a little bit different, it was not the same atmosphere as in Prague. In Slovakia they kept telling me I was a Czech, in the Czech lands then that I was a Slovak – my mother had relatives in Slovakia. In my mind I always thought I was neither Czech nor Slovak, I was Jewish. (...) I took Czechoslovakia as my home, I thought I would stay forever, I never considered leaving the country. But everything changed on the day of the Russian occupation.”
“My name is Dana Michailovicz, born Daniela Horová. Everyone called me Dana Horová though – so am I known in the Jewish Community in Prague. My father comes from an old Jewish family, originally from Štěchovice and from Braškov, but from 1848 all his ancestors lived in Prague. He did not come from a religious family but he had Bar-Mitzva. He was very active in sports. He won a prize in the Maccabiade, he represented Czechoslovakia in table tennis. He was a foreign soldier, too. He came to Palestine, he was on the ship Patria which sank, and fought in a foreign army in Tobruk. His name was Jindřich Heitler. The English could not pronounce the name, the boys laughed at him: ‘The Hitler came!” so he applied for a name change during the war. That is the reason why my name is Horová.”
Dana Mihailovici was born as Dana Horová in a Prague Jewish family in 1950. Her father, Jindřich Heitler, was a foreign soldier in Tobruk; her mother came from Slovakia. Dana took part in the activities of the Prague Jewish community. In the sixties she belonged to “The Children of Maisel Street” circle. In 1968 she graduated from high school and started to study at The Charles University in Prague. In the summer of 1969 she travelled with a group of Jewish youths to Israel for a six-week work stay, from which she did not come back. She finished her studies in Israel (mathematics and statistics). She lives in Haifa, North Israel.
