Introduction

Abstract

In September 1945, Arnošt Frischer, a leader of the Jewish community in post-war Czechoslovakia, addressed Czechoslovak Jewish survivors in the first issue of Věstník, published weekly by the Council of Jewish Religious Communities in Bohemia and Moravia, saying simply: ‘We have survived’.¹ Only 20 per cent of the pre-war Jewish population in Bohemia and Moravia survived the Nazi ghettos and death camps, or in time fled the Nazi sphere of influence to neutral and allied countries. Frischer celebrated with the community the end of six years of inhuman Nazi rule. Yet the Jewish survivors were slowly realising that the world had changed — that the third Czechoslovak Republic (1945–8) entirely differed from the interwar Masaryk Republic which was rightly considered by the Jews as a democratic safe haven in the sea of totalitarian and authoritarian regimes. In 1918, Masaryk’s Czechoslovakia accepted Jews of all ideological and national backgrounds. There were Jews who identified themselves as Czechs, Germans, Hungarians, or Jews, in both national and religious senses. During the 1920s and 1930s, Jews in Czechoslovakia enjoyed considerable freedom and an independent cultural and national development. After 1945, people whom the Jewish survivors met in the streets sympathised with their unfortunate plight, but at the same time their former neighbours often expressed displeasure that Jewish survivors returned and demanded restitution of their property previously confiscated by the Nazis.