Baruch Spergel - February 4, 2008
Family Escapes Czechoslovakia
You didn't write on Shabbos; did you have to get a note from someone?
BS: Huh?
Did you have to get a note from someone?
BS: From my parents-from my father to the teacher and, you know, it was okay.
When you had to-when you left Reichenberg...
BS: Hmm?
When you left Reichenberg...
BS: Yes.
...your parents said, "We're leaving," and that was it?
BS: No, my pa...
Did they explain, did they explain why you were leaving? Did they...
BS: Yes, of course, of course, of course.
ZF: For them, I don't know. I don't...
BS: My mother especially. My mother was, you know, my father was one of-kind of pragmatic, you know, just like me and he thought that everything will be okay but in the end he saw we must leave. So, he uh, he was the first one to leave. He went to Poland in, uh...
ZF: He went to Poland.
BS:...over the border and I don't know if he had papers or didn't have papers. Anyway, he got to Po...to Poland okay. My mother only left after we, after we le...after she sent us to, to, to England. And my brother left earlier to Palestine.
ZF: Yeah, he was older. He...
BS: That's my...
ZF: We left....
BS:...that's my brother, this is she-supposed to be.
ZF: That's from Prague I think.
BS: By the way all the, uh...
ZF: What I want to say is this: the order of the thing is were that we got up one day and we left, we left Sudetengebiet, we left Reichenberg, we came to Prague. Now, when the Germans entered Prague the first people that they took, I mean, they took the men usually. So, the men had to have papers or they got papers to go across the border, legally or illegally, to Poland. So our father left and the fath...the other fathers, too. Many of the-left. And my mother stayed behind and sent-tried to send the children out. Now, the-my eldest brother, he was at the time was sixteen and um, he got uh, aliyah. He made-came to uh, with the Jugend-called Jugend-Aliyah what they called it here. He, he was accepted to a kibbutz.
BS: Youth, Youth Aliyah, Aliyah.
Yeah, I can't remember. Was he part of the B'nai Akiva?
ZF: No, no there wasn't-I don't know what they were.
BS: ??? Blau-Weiss, Blau-Weiss was Mizrachi. Everyone...
??? that was the Communist...
ZF: Yeah, no they weren't the Communist group but this was uh, it was a religious but not very religious, you know. Mizrachi, Mizrachi what you here call Mizrachi.
Yeah, yeah.
ZF: Because he was sixteen he was accepted to a group there where he was sixteen he can work and so on so he came to a kibbutz. But he was thirteen or fourteen, he wasn't accepted. And then I don't know they found out about Winton. I don't know-didn't know about any lists. All this we found out-most of the children found out about it about ten years ago, fifteen years ago when there was the first Kindertrans...uh, Kinder...gathering of the Kinder in England.
BS: Yes ???
ZF: And that was because some of the, the older Kinder started asking themselves after the war, "How did we come to England? Who organized all of this?" and nobody knew so they started, you know, to look. And Gissing-what's her name?
Vera.
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