Asaf Auerbach

Ing. Asaf Auerbach was born in kibbutz Bet Alfa, in today's Israel, in May 1928. His parents came from Czechoslovakia and moved to Israel in 1922. They were influenced by the Zionist movement and its ideals about the settlement of Palestine at that time by the Jewish immigrants especially from Europe. His parents decided in 1930, probably because of health reasons, to come back to Prague. His father worked in an auditory company, his mother was a housewife and looked after their two sons Ruben and Asaf. His father was left-oriented; he was a member of the organization Rote Hilfe that looked after political refugees. After March 1939, Mr. and Mrs. Auerbach learned about the possibility to send both their sons to England. A family acquaintance from the kibbutz Hana Strasserová moved out there. In England she founded a committee that was willing to accept a group of children from Czechoslovakia. Asaf Auerbach, with his brother Ruben, left Czechoslovakia on July 18th, 1939. They were on one of the trains whose departure was organized by Nicholas Winton. They lived in a house ran by the above mentioned committee in the town Stoke on Trent. Asaf Auerbach attended a boarding school founded by the Czechoslovak exile government in 1943-1945. He returned to Prague in the summer of 1945. He met his grandma and his mother's sisters there. His parents were slaughtered in the extermination camp Auschwitz. He finished his Statistics studies after the war and started a family. Mr. Asaf Auerbach lives in Prague.

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