“The total of 40 relatives died from which the close relatives were about a half. And who knows what would have happened with us if the Germans caught us. Before the War, there were about 7 or 8 thousand Jews in Ostrava. And how many came back? About a hundred. Let’s say that three times more the people could stay somewhere else or emigrate. So there can be about one tenth of the Jewish inhabitants survived the Holocaust by one way or the other.”
“We had some hard times at the sea, a battleship had come, we thought that it was a British ship, but fortunately it was a Jewish ship, probably one of the first battleships of the Israeli Navy. That was a relief. We saw the lights at Haifa and landed in Caesarea. The next day I was in the army and I once again I was a soldier. Petr (Bachrach) and me, we got to Palmach. We didn’t know what it was, none of us spoke a word of Hebrew. We had a vague idea that it could be the elite division. We were trained at Kfar Yona, not far away from here and then we were sent to the Mountains near Jerusalem. It was tough, becouse we were not fighting against any disorganized groups but the Jordan-Arabic forces lead by the English officer Glub Pacha.”
[Did you attend school there?] “Not in the beginning. From April 1939 until winter 1941 I was very ill, but I don’t remember what it was. I recovered very slowly. My parents tried to get me to a boarding school with slightly better conditions. People were hungry. Not only cold but also hungry. The provisions were 50 grams of bread and a bit of flour and sugar. The boarding school was about eight kilometers from the camp. There were better conditions and especially with food. So I started attending school at the beginning of 1942. These boarding schools had their purpose and it was the communist indoctrination. We learnt more about the Revolution, Lenin and Stalin than Lermontov or Pushkin. But at least it was some education. But the most important thing was that we had a warm flat even though we had to provide the wood ourselves. We had three meals in a day, smaller portions. It wasn’t enough, you weren’t full, but it was better than in the camp. When I wanted to see my parents I had to ask the headmaster, who was directly linked to the NKVD, for a permission.”
“The Germans did us wrong and we wanted to do anything to stop them. So I got to the Czechoslovak forces, to Svoboda’s army. At the beginning I had an ‘excellent’ career. I was a personal assistant of a certain major. Then I was promoted, I served in the communication centre and as the assistant of the head mechanic at the motorized infantry. Finally I passed through the telecommunications training. I was a communication engineer at the 5th regiment of heavy infantry. And because I was very small and the radio was a large box, sometimes you could see a walking large box with a rifle. And that was me.”
“My motto? I don’t know if it’s really my motto, but I live by that. It is to be an enlightened egoist. You must observe your own needs, but take care not to harm those around you. I live by that motto. If I am right or not, I don’t know. One day, He will tell me.”
A communication engineer of the Czechoslovak Army and the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs was born in 1928 in Moravská Ostrava as Hanuš Rosenbaum. In April and September 1939, his family escaped before the Nazis through Krakow to the part of Poland held by the Soviets. They got to a labor camp in the Jakutsk district at Siberia from where a fifteen year old Hanuš volunteered to the Czechoslovak Army. By the end of 1944 he served as a communication engineer at the heavy infantry. In 1945 he left the army and emigrated to Israel. He fought in the First War of Independence at the Israeli front. In 1950 he left the army and seven years later he applied for a position of a communication engineer at the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Before his firat mission abroad he Hebraized his name to Hanan Ron. He served at different places including Bucharest, the business department in Köln, Germany, in Congo and finally in Rome. He left from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs into the intelligence agency Mossad. He lives in Tel Yitzhak between the cities Herzliya and Netanya.
