Tag #157139 - Interview #78067 (abraham pressburger)

Now back to the position of Jewish youth in the pre-war period. I had joined the Maccabi Hatzair. In those days that movement, as a youth aliyah, created training centers: they were named Miha, Mitl Hachsharah, and one such was in Liptovsky Mikulas, in which I was as well. I developed a lot there. It was a beautiful life. Forty young people. A time of my first love, but also a time of getting to know many ideologies, many dogmas. It was the year 1939. After being there several months, I returned home. One small group really did leave for Israel. In those days I was greatly influenced by the ideal of socialism and I saw in the Soviet Union an ideal, classless society, which would in the end defeat Hitler and ensure that the world would be beautiful. When I was 16, I joined the underground Communist Party, the Communist Youth. It was organized into cells of three people that knew each other, and always one of them had a connection to another three, with another such illegal cell. The purpose of this type of organization was that if they caught and jailed someone, that they couldn't catch everyone all at once.