Parallel to the legal emigration efforts, there was another kind of rescue attempt: illegal immigration to British Palestine. This, like any emigration of Jews from Europe, was actively encouraged by the Nazi authorities until the summer of 1941. The Emigration Department could support these activities only indirectly, because otherwise it would have lost the opportunity to seek legal immigration opportunities in other British colonies.
Now watch excerpts from Jiří Boehm's testimony.
Jiří Boehm was born in December 1921 in Prague. He grew up in the centre of Prague, from a young age he learned foreign languages. He left Czechoslovakia on an illegal transport that ended with the arrival of the steamer Milos in Haifa, Palestine, and his arrest by the British authorities with his planned deportation on the Patria ship. Jewish activists attempted to prevent the deportation by using explosive systems planted on the ship while cutting its side. However, the Patria was in worse shape than anyone expected and sank very quickly.
Jiří survived. He spent 11 months in the British internment camp Atlit, then joined the Czechoslovak army in the Middle East. Later he fought in France, at Dunkirk, in the Ardennes, and after being seriously injured in a car accident he was transported from Pilsen to an American hospital in Strakonice. He was demobilized in January 1946. Only he and one of his mother's cousins survived the war. He remained in Czechoslovakia and married, working for UNICEF and other international organizations, liquidated in the early 1950s.
He believed in the building of a new, safer world, only to be eventually branded a Zionist spy and saboteur, a member of the secret Slánský conspiracy ring trying to bring back capitalism. He became a worker, first cooking glue for paper bags, later he was allowed to glue the bags. In the evenings, he studied economics. As a worker he became a technologist at the Prague Paper Mills, and after his rehabilitation he was appointed its commercial director. After the occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1968 he travelled to Austria, but during the normalisation period he returned to Prague and had to start from scratch again. Until 1990 he worked as a stoker.
The interview was filmed on 27 March 1996 in Prague.