Anti Semitism

[PeverilPeril 3,279]

My mum's dad was a Jew. That makes me 25% Jewish. Bugger! I could be four time better off

[Jill Sparrow 10,304]

Met some very nice Jewish people at a music festival in Prague in 1980. Otto and his wife had a daughter who was my age, so we all spent a lot of time together. Otto had lived in the UK for many years but still spoke his native language, which proved very useful, although he flatly refused to translate the graffiti scrawled all over the decaying but beautiful buildings. He would only say it was anti communist and not fit for young ladies' ears!

 

I have never forgotten sitting with Otto, his wife and daughter in a sunny cobbled square, drinking our morning coffee when he casually pointed out a window on the fifth floor of a tenement building. It was, he said, the flat where he had lived with his parents and siblings in the 1930s. One day, there was a knock on the door and they were given 15 minutes to collect what they could carry and get out.  Otto added that his parents perished in the concentration camps and he was lucky to survive.

 

Sitting there in the Easter sunshine, his story seemed  completely surreal to me. I could not even imagine it.

It is something I have never forgotten.

 

Prague looks very different now and the Berlin wall is no more.  Most of us don't have a clue what those days were like. Let's hope we never find out.