,Kde domov muj?’: Where is my home?

Kde domov muj?’ – Where is my home? – is the question asked in the first line of the Czech national anthem. Over the last 60 years it was a question I had often asked myself. I had decided to visit the Czech Republic and Teplitz-Schönau, the country and town of my birth, one last time, accompanied by my wife, my friend and support of over 50 years, my two sons, their wives and our three grandchildren. Nostalgia perhaps, or to lay a few ghosts for me and to show my grandchildren a part of their heritage. We travelled the 60 miles north of Prague to the town where I was born. It had been cleaned up a little since its neglected Communist days but it certainly was not the town of my childhood. The memories flooded back: my first school; walks to and playing in the ruined local castle with friends, most of whom had perished in the Holocaust; the shops, the restaurants and Gasthäuser; and the comfort of a large, warm and close family. The houses that once belonged to my grandparents and great-grandparents still stood, now divided and sub-divided, neglected and shabby. My English family could only look at the shabby streets and the remaining landmarks where I had once lived. For them these invoked no memories and prompted no vignettes of an incomprehensible past or of ancestors far removed by time and culture from their own lives. On our return journey to Prague, we stopped to pay our respects and say Kaddish at that evil, incomprehensible place of hate and death, Terezin. Prague invoked some memories but, for the most part, I viewed that beautiful city like any other tourist. The old Jewish quarter was the exception, for this too was my children’s and grandchildren’s heritage. How could they not be affected on finding the names of our relatives inscribed on the wall of the Pinchas Synagogue or the poignant exhibition of drawings and art of the children of Terezin? Home is defined in the dictionary as ‘a place of origin – one’s native country’. Mine was the spa town nestling at the foot of the Giant and Ore Mountains of northern Bohemia. Mother’s large Jewish family were strangers among the Germans and Slavs, yet after 200 years were so integrated into the social and business life of the town and area that they didn’t notice (or want to acknowledge) that theyKde domov muj?’ – Where is my home? – is the question asked in the first line of the Czech national anthem. Over the last 60 years it was a question I had often asked myself. I had decided to visit the Czech Republic and Teplitz-Schönau, the country and town of my birth, one last time, accompanied by my wife, my friend and support of over 50 years, my two sons, their wives and our three grandchildren. Nostalgia perhaps, or to lay a few ghosts for me and to show my grandchildren a part of their heritage. We travelled the 60 miles north of Prague to the town where I was born. It had been cleaned up a little since its neglected Communist days but it certainly was not the town of my childhood. The memories flooded back: my first school; walks to and playing in the ruined local castle with friends, most of whom had perished in the Holocaust; the shops, the restaurants and Gasthäuser; and the comfort of a large, warm and close family. The houses that once belonged to my grandparents and great-grandparents still stood, now divided and sub-divided, neglected and shabby. My English family could only look at the shabby streets and the remaining landmarks where I had once lived. For them these invoked no memories and prompted no vignettes of an incomprehensible past or of ancestors far removed by time and culture from their own lives. On our return journey to Prague, we stopped to pay our respects and say Kaddish at that evil, incomprehensible place of hate and death, Terezin. Prague invoked some memories but, for the most part, I viewed that beautiful city like any other tourist. The old Jewish quarter was the exception, for this too was my children’s and grandchildren’s heritage. How could they not be affected on finding the names of our relatives inscribed on the wall of the Pinchas Synagogue or the poignant exhibition of drawings and art of the children of Terezin? Home is defined in the dictionary as ‘a place of origin – one’s native country’. Mine was the spa town nestling at the foot of the Giant and Ore Mountains of northern Bohemia. Mother’s large Jewish family were strangers among the Germans and Slavs, yet after 200 years were so integrated into the social and business life of the town and area that they didn’t notice (or want to acknowledge) that they were different. My early childhood was spent innocently, happy within my family and within the community. I always knew I was slightly different because my father was a Hungarian but it was of no apparent consequence, unlike my uncles and other relatives who were Czechoslovaks. I had a grandma who lived in Budapest whom we visited regularly. However, in my mind as a child, home was where I lived and belonged. Suddenly our lives – my life – changed in 1938. To escape the political change and consequent persecution, our family dispersed throughout the Czechoslovak Republic. We moved to a strange flat in a large, unfamiliar city called Prague. I sensed my parents’ worry and uncertainty and, for the first time, I experienced discrimination. The school at which my mother wanted to register me told her in no uncertain terms and in front of me that Jews from the German-speaking northern part of the country were not wanted. My family, my friends had gone. My parents remained. I discovered I was not Czech but, like my father, Hungarian – somewhat confusing for a young boy. Many years later I understood that it was thanks to our Hungarian passports and nationality that our lives were saved. We came to England as refugees on the way to America, a country so different from our Central European home. It had a different language in which I couldn’t communicate, a different culture. England, however, was the country in which I eventually grew up and in which I went to school and made friends whilst never forgetting my early childhood. Unlike my contemporaries, I had no relatives, no grandparents, no aunts or uncles, no roots. I grew up with my parents. We lived in the ‘here and now refugee world’, where my parents’ entire social circle were refugees like us and where German was the language we spoke. Daily comparisons of life in England with that of the past ‘zu Hause’ – at home – were made. We differed from our neighbours not only in nationality but also in that we were Jews. We even differed from the local Jews because we didn’t stem from Eastern Europe and came from a less orthodox tradition and established emancipated Jewish background. Gradually I grew up in England. Along the way I made friends among Jews and Gentiles, some of whom were to become lifelong friends, and I was privileged over the years to be involved in their and their families’ lives and they with mine. I became a citizen of Britain, never an Englishman. We anglicised our name; to all intents and purposes I had integrated. My business often took me to Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Austria. Although two of the countries were now under Communist dictatorship, Austria still seemed to call me to a remembered home, like a voice from the past. The food, the language, which I spoke accent-free, the buildings and countryside brought back memories of my early home. My frequent visits to Czechoslovakia and Hungary strengthened those early memories of my former home, yet my revulsion towards the people who had betrayed and rejected us, their fellow citizens, confirmed that Central Europe could no longer be home. My wife is English, my children and their wives are English and my grandchildren are English. Yet one of my sons and his family are domiciled in Switzerland and, like the proverbial wandering Jew, he and our grandchildren were destined to move on to another home and land and begin another integration. On our recent visit, I showed my family part of their heritage and they saw evidence of the horrors and injustice done to our family. Now it is time to move on. The voices of the past will be with me for the rest of my days but the answer to the question ‘Where is my home?’ is for me ‘Ubi bene ibi patria’ (Where it is best is my home). And that is England – that decent, democratic, sometimes maddening land that accepted and protected me, educated me, gave me a new family and, above all, gave me peace and the confirmation of what I am. Bob Norton