ABSTRACT
The parental generation of Holocaust survivors (the so-called first generation) experienced the war, the years immediately following the war, and the Stalinist period of communism differently from their children—the second generation. The Czech and Slovak Jews who were born during or after the Second World War had no direct experience of concentration camps, gas chambers, or slaughter of Jews by Nazis or Nazi-sympathisers and they were too young to feel the full impact of Stalinist purges and the anti-Semitism evident in the communist show trials of the early 1950s. Most members of the postwar generation came of age during the de-Stalinization period of 1962–68—an important historical stage of Czechoslovak communist reform. As I have argued in chapter 1, “in contrast with other communist countries, the Czech/Slovak Jewish community has been shaped not just by the Holocaust and by Stalinism at large, but also by the very specific experiences of de-Stalinization which eventually led to the Prague Spring of 1968. There is no direct counterpart to this experience in other parts of East–Central Europe.”
