My name is Michal Arend. I am a sociologist by education, currently retired. I belong to the “Second Generation,” a term referring to the descendants of concentration camp survivors. I was among the first to begin speaking in schools and at public forums about the experiences my parents and other Jewish ancestors faced before, during, and after the Second World War. We also address the impact of these events on us—what we experienced growing up with our parents and how we later raised our own children. I lived with my family in Prague’s Letná district until 1968. Since then, I have resided in Switzerland. I started lecturing at schools in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Germany, and Switzerland in 2015. More recently, since 2024, I have also been leading online discussions in Czech and German for Czech and international students who attend the educational programs prepared by the Terezín Memorial’s Department of Education.
In the following text, I describe other milestones and activities in my life related to my Jewish heritage, as well as what has become important and meaningful to me in my later years.
Childhood: I was born in 1949 to parents who had returned from Auschwitz as the only survivors of what had once been large families. Thanks to them — to their ability to value life and the strength that carried them through — my sister, born in early 1953, and I enjoyed a beautiful, loving, contented, and carefree childhood. We knew that we were Jews, but our parents did not speak to us about what that meant or about what they had lived through during the war. Perhaps out of fear, and out of a parental instinct that they could protect us from the atrocities they themselves had endured simply by letting us grow up like any other Czech children, they chose silence. And so we celebrated Christmas, ate carp, and my father told us about ancient Rome, Greece and Egypt, but almost nothing about the culture and certainly nothing about the religion of our ancestors.
Adolescence: I remember the years between 1964 and 1968 as some of the most beautiful of my life. I went to dance classes, experienced my first kisses and first loves, drank beer with my classmates, and filled fifteen quarters a day on a hop-picking brigade like a proper young builder of the communist society. When the political situation began to ease in 1966, a few friends and I started visiting the Jewish community in Prague, where the still-frightened rabbis and other elderly members tried to explain to us, even if only briefly, what it meant to be a Jew. We didn’t really understand it, and we didn’t care much about it either — but we were proud of our “otherness” and of the State of Israel.
Emigration: After the violent end of the Prague Spring in August 1968, several thousand Jews left Czechoslovakia. Most of them feared the return of what their ancestors had experienced in the 1930s and 1940s, having remained in the country they considered their home, where they had mistakenly felt safe. My parents were also afraid of what might happen after August 1968. That is why we, too, left and found a beautiful new—and incredibly accommodating—home in Switzerland. We were welcomed there, and everyone helped us start a new life. While in Czechoslovakia we had been a tiny minority as Jews because of the Holocaust, this was not the case in Zurich, and gradually I stopped feeling like an outsider there as well.
Marriage and fatherhood: Although I had known my ex-wife since the early days of our stay in Switzerland, we didn’t begin dating until 1977, and we were married in the spring of 1979. Like me, she is from Prague and Jewish, and together we have two sons. Our marriage, shaped by our different values and views on Judaism, was not always easy, but we stayed together for more than twenty years before eventually divorcing. Today, we are good friends again, and we even go together from time to time to babysit our little granddaughters.
Auschwitz: All my life, I was apprehensive about visiting the place where my parents and so many of my less fortunate ancestors had endured what, in my mind, had taken on the shape of unimaginable horrors and humiliation—and where, for my parents, thank God, the terror did not end in death and physical destruction. I kept postponing the visit. In 1995, while on a trip to Cracow, I suddenly realized how close I was to Auschwitz, and I could no longer bring myself to avoid it. And what did my first visit to Auschwitz do to me? I realized that everything that had happened there, and elsewhere during the Second World War, was not as overwhelmingly terrible for me as I had feared it would be. I also stopped having the recurring dreams in which SS men chased me, tried to shoot me, or push me into the gas chamber.
Israel: I was initially hesitant to visit that country for several reasons. Jews in the Diaspora often hold very different views on Jewish issues and on the conflict between Israel and the Arab states, and I worried that these differences would feel even sharper in Israel. Once again, I was wrong. During my brief visit in 1997, many Israelis didn’t share my views, but—unlike Jews in the Diaspora—they didn’t seem to care what I thought about the situation. Instead, they made me feel as though I belonged there. It was a sense of belonging I had never experienced anywhere else, even though I couldn’t—and still can’t—speak Hebrew. I felt they were incredibly close to me, as if we shared something important, a connection unlike anything I had experienced with most non-Jewish Czechs, Slovaks, or Swiss people, if you’ll forgive the comparison.
Černovice near Tábor: After I recovered from the divorce and the end of my marriage, I met my current partner, a Swiss woman who is Christian. Our first trip together, in 2000, led us to South Bohemia. Before we left, my mother, who was already quite old and ill at the time, suddenly recalled that Černovice was not far from Nové Hrady. She urged me to go, explaining that her father had lived there until 1920 and that there was a Jewish cemetery nearby. She suggested I might still find some trace of my ancestors and her grandparents there. And indeed, traces remained. Surrounded by a scatter of rubble, discarded cigarette butts, and shards of broken beer bottles lay the gravestones of great-great-grandfather, Michael, and great-great-grandmother, Terezie. Both tombstones—among the precious few that were still standing and not destroyed—bore a typically Czech inscription that was almost illegible: “Sleep sweetly.” I found myself crying, just as I had in Auschwitz, and I promised myself that this cemetery must not disappear. I felt determined to take action to ensure it wouldn’t be left overgrown, even though there are no Jews living in Černovice anymore. The preservation and renovation efforts were successful, largely due to my friend and sculptor Michael Deiml and me. In 2001-2002, we constructed a remarkable memorial next to the cemetery dedicated to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust in Černovice, a site visitors from all over the world now come to appreciate.
Pacov: Pacov lies only 15 km from Černovice, and between 2016 and 2018 I was invited several times to take part in discussions with students at the local grammar school. The prewar Jewish community in Pacov was larger than that of Černovice, but today no Jews live there. Unlike Černovice—where the former synagogue was converted into a residential building—Pacov has preserved two buildings that visibly bear witness to its Jewish past: the synagogue, which served as a warehouse during the communist era, and the neighboring rabbinic house, where the last rabbi of Pacov, Natan Gutmann, lived with his family before the war. It was there that I learned about a civic association called Tikkun[1], whose mission is not only to restore both buildings, but also to preserve the historical memory and tragic fate of Pacov’s Jewish community. After I joined the association, its founding members became my close friends. Thanks to private donations and financial support from Czech and international organizations, the exterior renovation of the former synagogue has already been completed. Work on the interior has begun, but it will take several more years to finish. I very much hope to live to see the grand opening of the fully restored building. You are warmly invited to visit the association’s website and to come and see the Jewish monuments in Černovice and Pacov. My friends from the Tikkun association and I will be very happy to welcome you. If you would like to ask me anything or share your thoughts, feel free to write to me at: arendmichal@gmail.com.
Michal Arend
[1] Tikkun means ‟repairˮ or ‟rectificationˮ in Hebrew.
