Refugees

The seat of the Jewish community was also an important centre of social welfare. This included helping refugees, both during the First World War, when they came mostly from the front areas of Galicia and Bukovina, and during the rise of Nazism to power in Germany after 1933.

In 1938, a massive influx of refugees from Nazi-annexed Austria began, later joined by a wave of refugees from the ceded Czechoslovak borderlands.

Jewish refugees were certainly not welcomed by Czechoslovakia at the time: the authorities tried to deport the refugees back to the countries from which they had fled persecution. And so the Brno police, led by Commissar Vrba, arrested refugees, while plain-clothes agents patrolled the area around the Jewish Community's headquarters on Koliště and checked anyone who looked like a person seeking help. Deporting refugees to the border often solved nothing because the Nazi Third Reich did not want to take the refugees back.

Document from the National Archive in Prague.