NEVER AGAIN

CZECH MATE -A LIFE IIV PROGRESS

By: Thomas O. Hecht

I was born in Brno, Czechoslovakia in 1929. Brno was the second largest city in the only democracy in Central Europe.

In retrospect, I have realized that the Hecht family was a modern middle-class Jewish family who kept certain Jewish traditions such as the Friday night candle lighting, a kosher household and a somewhat disciplined attendance at synagogue on High Holidays.

We lived in a beautiful apartment building in Brno where my father ran a division of my grandfather's leather business  until it collapsed during the depression.

One of my memories of Brno was listening to the radio in my parents' living room and hearing the voice of Adolph Hitler bellowing hatred, a precursor to the Holocaust. His loud ramblings frightened me. His evil deeds impacted our lives.

We moved to Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia, in 1935 and remained there until September 1939. My father, Eugene Hecht, a perennial optimist, had great faith in the strength of Western European states. He felt that the wisest course for the family to take was to leave central Europe impacted by brutally anti-Semitic Nazi German policies, and find our way to the safety of Western Europe.

ln May, 1939, my father had managed to fly to Paris on a "business trip," and he had remained there. He began to develop a strategy for rescuing his family from what was, obviously, an increasingly dangerous situation in Nazi- dominated Czechoslovakia.

Thus it was that two weeks after the outbreak of world war II, my mother, my sister Madeleine and l, departed for Budapest, illegally, from the Nazi puppet state of Slovakia, hoping that we would somehow make it to Paris and rejoin my father.

We arrived in Budapest on September 15th, 1939, even though we had only Czechoslovak passports, documents from a country no longer in existence. Madeleine's future husband Andre Feher, a law student, was waiting to greet us at the railway station. Andre had connections enabling us to have our questionable entry permits extended.

After tense weeks in Budapest, we left for the French capital, undertaking the long train journey through Yugoslavia, Italy, Switzerland and then into France. We arrived in Paris on December 1st, 1939. Father met us at the railway station. The family was re-united, and we were in what Eugene Hecht felt was a safe haven.


We would stay in Paris until June 13, 1940, a scant 24 hours before the Germans occupied the city. That day,  we were miraculously able to find and hire one of the  extremely scarce taxi-cabs (a battered old Renault), as hundreds of thousands of Parisians joined the exodus from the city, to take us to the railway station (Gare de Lyon) with four small suitcases. We found tens of thousands lined up, hoping to board a train to escape advancing German forces.

The family's perilous wanderings took us to Dijon, Lyon, Avignon, Bézier and Toulouse. We were tantalizingly close to the Spanish border. our goal now was to cross into Spain and reach the neutral port of Lisbon where we hoped to be able to board a ship bound for the security of the New World.

After an unsuccessful attempt by the family to cross into Spain on foot through the mountains, my father came up with a new strategy. He proposed that the family seek shelter in Nice, now controlled by the Italians. Claiming that we were Hungarians (since we spoke the language perfectly) who had lost our documents in a bombing raid, the family asked the Honorary Consul of Hungary in Marseille, (who did not speak a word of Hungarian) for, and received, four legitimate Hungarian passports. The two fascist states of Italy and Hungary had extremely friendly relations.

With our new status, we left by train from  Marseille for Nice, reaching the city on July 24th or 25th, 1940. After the tension of the last months, we now enjoyed the relative tranquility of the Mediterranean resort. I went to a Jesuit school in Nice and came first in the class in the study of the catechism. Living under Vichy France, however, became dangerous for non-French Jews. The threat was to be interned in the Camp de Gurs which was to become a transit camp for deportations to extermination camps in Eastern Europe. With great effort and difficulty we secured a Spanish transit visa and we reached Lisbon, the gateway to leave Europe.

We spent ten months in Lisbon waiting for visas to escape from Nazi-dominated Europe, and with the help of the Czech government in exile in London, we secured Canadian visas valid for the duration of the war. We were among those fortunate refugees who were able to enter Canada whose Government practiced the policy of "None is too many". We sailed on a refugee ship, the Serpa Pinto, with 1,200 passengers, and after a six-week crossing of the Atlantic, we reached New York on December 23 1941. After spending a week in Ellis Island, we arrived by train in Montreal on December 31. 1941.

Our calvary ended when the train pulled into Montreal's Bonaventure station. It was New Year's Eve 194l. I was twelve years old. My family and I had reached Canada, knowing no one, and virtually penniless. And we would learn quickly that the Montreal Jewish Community was ill prepared to help us in any significant way. We were on our own.