I was fascinated to read your article on the rights of Jewish children born between 1949 and 1969 to Czech parents who fled the Nazis to claim citizenship (Czechs urged to repeal law denying rights to Kindertransport descendants, 9 February). Coincidentally, as the article was published, paperwork for my passport was arriving from Prague: my Czech birth, marriage and nationality certificates. This has taken almost five years.
To obtain the right to Czech nationality, I had to take the government to court in Prague and, when it caved in, I received a call from the consulate in London to congratulate me on being the first person to successfully challenge the law.
It was an absurd case as both my grandparents and my father were born in what is now the Czech Republic; my grandfather, the Czech Jewish writer Hermann Ungar (my heritage being the subject of my memoir, The Boy from Boskovice: A Father’s Secret Life), was also a diplomat who served in Berlin and at Prague Castle before his death in 1929. There are blue plaques to him not only in his home town, but also in the Spanish synagogue in Prague. He could not have been more Czech. My father fled in 1939 and joined the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve as an intelligence officer during the war.
Nevertheless, the authorities said I was ineligible because, in the 1930 census, my grandmother said she spoke German as a first language – as most assimilated Jews did. This was after they gave up on trying to prove the disputed Beneš decrees. Kafka could not have made up the ridiculous bureaucracy of the past five years.
Vicky Unwin
London
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