Avraham Talmi

“We were there for a year, the youth, the Czechoslovak youth got in touch with Beneš’s government in London, they reached out to the British government and obtained permission for the emigrants in Mauricius to be able to volunteer into the Czechoslovak army. So there were eighty of us boys wo volunteered and left Mauricius and went to South Africa. There, the English gave us uniforms, and Mr Kováč, who was a pilot, was chief of this group, and I was his deputy. The English made me an acting sergeant. So we came to Suez, there we were welcomed by a Czechoslovak officer, and so we who were already in the army, we went to Haifa. There was an anti-air unit in Haifa, and those who weren’t there, say me as a new recruit, we went to Sidi Bishr, near Alexandria, where they had a boot camp.”

“The English were looking for some fifteen thousand new pilots. So even Czechoslovak boys could sign up, so I applied for a flying course. There were about eight of us boys who passed the exams. We were to leave Haifa for the course in England on 1 October 1942. We arrived in Haifa on 25 September, we were immediately given leave, a five day pass, and we were to return to the camp on 1 October. But I didn’t return, because the new contact officer declared that we weren’t going to fight, we weren’t going into combat, we were the core of the next Czechoslovak army in Czechoslovakia after the war. So I reckoned - I spent three years travelling to Palestine, that journey, suffering from hunger, just so I could become the core of the next Czechoslovak army? So I went to my friends in the kibbutz, who I’d been with for the Hah Sharrah in Ivančice, and I joined the kibbutz.”

“I felt more antisemitism when I was in the Czechoslovak foreign army. For example, for Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, we were on the front, sleeping together with the aspirant school. I had a good friend who was a professor at the American university in Beirut. We didn’t make friends with him until there. At nine p.m. we heard the radio, BBC London, our president wished Jewish soldiers a happy new year and that we’d live to see our homeland again and reunite with our family. All of a sudden, I hear a priest from the Catholic faculty in Olomouc, saying: ‘Our president has no business talking just about Jews.’ So I reckoned: ‘There you go, you say there isn’t any antisemitism, and what’s this, this isn’t antisemitism?’ And he said ‘Don’t take that seriously.’”