Colonel Arnošt Polák

“I wasn’t liable to the emigration laws. That’s why the Germans let us out as children. The only problem was getting to England. The Quakers, an international religion with the aim of living a charitable life, helped us. They also helped a lot of Jewish children to get to England. I left from the Wilson train station via Germany and the Netherlands and then by ship to England. It wasn’t any great adventure; it was pure luck to get out.”

“We were a Jewish family so it was very unpleasant under Hitler. I and my brother left and our parents stayed there and all our family died in a gas chamber.”

“A friend of mine had a flat in the Jungmann street that he inherited from his parents. I stayed in this flat with him. One day a Prague-city order came that his flat is being confiscated and that there’s no appeal to it. A truck came, took away the furniture and the mayor’s deputy, who was a communist, moved in. So I said to myself: “You don’t have a family here and you don’t want to live in a country, where they can kick you out of your own flat without the right of appeal. So I packed my things and left to England again in 1946.”

“I can’t say it was Anti-Semitism. They were making jokes, of course, they were making remarks but it wasn’t Anti-Semitism. It wasn’t any stringent Anti-Semitism. I can’t complain.”

“I was slightly over fifteen when I left the Protectorate and went to England. I was considered to be a child from the Germans so I didn’t need any visas, I simply went to England. The English accepted me as a “refugee” with the condition that I’d work as an agricultural worker. After two months of training in practical agricultural matters on a farm I worked for another two years at various farms as a laborer. When I turned eighteen and thereby could enroll in the army, I went to London to the Ministry of Defense where I signed up for the Air Force.”

“A lot of Jewish families that had lost their property and real-estate were given compensation and restitutions afterwards. I never asked anything from the Germans and never got anything. That’s because I thought back then just as I think today that you can’t compensate for murder with restitution. I haven’t forgiven them till today.”