"Historia magistra vitae - history is the teacher of life! A beautiful saying, but it doesn´t work!"
Pavel Oliva was born November 23rd 1923 in Prague-Karlín in a Jewish family, his native name was Ohrenstein. He changed his name after the war (olive is a tree growing in Greece, known for its beneficial oil, oil also symbolizes victory). When he was eighteen he was ordered by the occupation authorities to report for transport; in December 1941 he got into the so-called AK (Aufbaukommando) II, which was one of the first Jewish groups who were preparing the ghetto in Terezín for the arrival of thousands of Jews. He remembers that while on the train, the young people were singing; they thought they were simply going for a work holiday and that they would be back by spring. In Terezín, he was assigned to a mess-hall service (Menagedienst), he was in charge of distribution of meals. In December 1943 he was, together with some other 2500 Jews, transported to Auschwitz-Birkenau and assigned to the Kanalreiniger commando - cleaners of sewers. The sewer piping was very narrow in order to prevent escapes of prisoners, and it was thus often becoming clogged. In autumn 1944 he passed a selection of prisoners to be sent to labour camps in the Reich, and he was sent to a camp built at a site of a bombed-out factory in Schwarzheide, which had been used for production of synthetic petrol made from wood. He also experienced the death march to Vansdorf and Litoměřice; he walked all the way to Terezín, where the Red Cross then took care of him. While imprisoned, he and his friend began believing in the communist ideology as a possibility for the new world order. After the war he joined the Communist Party; he studied classical philology and specialized in the history of ancient Greece. He eventually became a university professor and an authority on ancient Greece respected all over the world. With horror he watched the political trials of the 1950s, and he definitely parted with the communist ideology, as he says, in 1956, after the 20th congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, but he kept his party ID card. In 1983, his son Ivan Oliva emigrated to West Germany. In spite of that, Pavel Oliva was still permitted to travel abroad, owing probably to his being the only real expert on ancient history and also thanks to his colleague from the Institute of History, who had an "influential" brother and who became Oliva's guarantor.
