We survived Terezín because they couldn‘t do without my dad, a plumber
Stáhnout obrázek
Petr Vogel was born on 12 August 1937 in Prague. Both parents, Jana and Jiří Vogel, came from Jewish families, but they did not practice their faith. Between the wars, his father owned a plumbing business and his mother managed the company‘s accounts. Soon after the German occupation of Czechoslovakia, the parents lost their jobs and had to move to their grandparents‘ apartment in Josefov, Prague. In November 1941, his father Jiří Vogel was summoned to the first transport to Terezín, the so-called Ak. It consisted of men who began to rebuild the former military fortress into a new European Jewish ghetto. His mother with little Peter followed the father a month later. The Vogels survived the war thanks to their father‘s work. As head plumber, who checked the functioning of the water supply and sanitary facilities, he became indispensable in Terezín. After the war, the family acquired a flat from the Germans on Letná Street, and Petr entered La Guardia Gymnasium on Strossmayer Square after finishing primary and municipal school. He then entered the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics of the Charles University (MFF UK) and after a year of study he transferred to the newly established Czech Technical University (ČVUT), where he studied nuclear physics. After passing the state exams, he met scientists from the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubno in the Soviet Union at a summer school in Slovakia and joined them as a scientific aspirant. This brought him into contact with the top scientists of the time. When the borders were opened in 1968, Petr Vogel, already a PhD candidate, was invited to Copenhagen for a research fellowship. He and his wife decided to remain in exile and settled in California in 1970. The witness obtained a research position at the California Institute of Technology, where he was also professor emeritus at the time of the recording, in 2024.
