In 1939, eleven-year-old Heinz Vogel left the land of his birth, Czechoslovakia, with his parents to escape the Nazis’ persecution of the Jews. They left behind family and friends, who were to perish. They themselves had no idea where they would find refuge.

Heinz’s memoirs tell the story – from the good years in the newly founded nation of Czechoslovakia, through the gathering storm, when the menace was evident even to a young boy, to the family’s journey across Europe to England and settling in as refugees.

These memoirs were originally written as a record for his family and published online to be accessible to them. Heinz didn’t know it at the time, but they were to lead to him becoming involved in a project to trace the surviving Jewish community of Ostrava and to find a new vocation in the last third of his life keeping alive the memory of the Holocaust, so that the warnings of history might be heeded. Heinz died in November 2023, aged 95.

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A Certificate to Prove It

by Heinz Vogel

Dedicated to my family here, and yet to come.
Weybridge, 1996