Avraham Veselý

“A Jewish cemetery. The teacher – I don’t know whether she was Jewish or not – began telling us about the holocaust. She said that Germans killed all Jews. I wanted to raise my hand and say, no, not all of them, I am here, I exist. I knew that I was a Jew and that we wanted to go to Israel. In the first children’s home, when I was five years old, one of the nurses suddenly came to me while we were on an outing in forest, and she embraced me and told me: ‘Don’t be afraid, you are not the same like everybody else, I will take care of you.’ She gave me some candy. I knew that the nurses had probably seen in the shower room that I was circumcised, that I had brit milah.”

“In what other country in the world you are not allowed to leave that country? It was not that he had done something wrong, he just wanted to go to another country. It is something normal. I don’t like it here, so I go to America, or I don’t like it here and so I go to Russia. What has he done? Nothing. It was ridiculous. He spent nine years in prison because he wanted to move to Israel, nothing more.”

“We had many problems in Czechoslovakia, but we didn’t have financial problems, because the entire Jewish world was taking care of us. This is a well-known thing. (…) The Jewish Community, Joint, HIAS (Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, auth.’s note), they were all taking care of us. As for the money, everything was alright, but the communists always let us know that they were watching us.”

“They didn’t do any problems for us. A customs official came in the morning when we were packing the contents of the whole apartment into large wooden boxes. He came in the morning, looked at it and said: ‘You are really busy.’ And he left. He came in the evening, stamped all the boxes, received an amount of money equal to about one month’s salary and left. That was the entire inspection procedure. (Could you say that your parents had made some arrangements to make him so lenient?) No, they were told to do like this, at that time it was done that way, everybody was doing it. If they had not given him anything, he would have turned around and started: ‘Open this box, and this and that.’ During the period of Slánský’s trial (…) if they had found even a trifle, they would have imprisoned them immediately and confiscate all their property.”