Peter Arton

Peter was born in 1922 in Warsaw, but grew up in the Bohemian city of Teplice. After the Munich Agreement in 1938, Apfelbaum family moved to Prague and started to make preparation to leave Europe. With the outbreak of the war, part of the family was unable to get exit visas from Czechoslovakia and Peter’s own long journey started. He left for Poland and then he traveled, often while undertaking huge risks, through Bialystok, Vilnius, Moscow, and Vladivostok, finally reaching Japan in 1941. Peter obtained a transit visa to Japan thanks to a Japanese diplomat, the Consul in Kaunas. After traveling further to  Shanghai, he registered to join the Czechoslovak army. Traveling to Singapore and South Africa, he reached Great Britain in 1942 where he started his military training. He chose to join the Royal Air Force. Notwithstanding his wish to be a pilot, Peter became a navigator thanks to his good knowledge of math, and till the end of the war participated in 49 flights. With the end of the war he returned to Prague, where he quickly advanced both in the air force as well as in the Communist hierarchy. Realizing in time that the Czechoslovak communist regime was becoming increasingly Stalinist and anti-Semitic, he decided to go back to Britain. He took over his father’s textile factory in London and very swiftly became a very successful businessman. In the peak of the Cold War he became a suspect of being involved with the communist Czechoslovak secret service. In 1953 he was deported from Britain to Israel, where he continued in his successful business career.