Flight from Prague – The Making of a Refugee

A Lunch Time Session at the Linen Hall

Friday 26th September 2025
Flight from Prague – The Making of a Refugee
by Michael Lewis

It was another ordinary Friday in Belfast, though the Linen Hall Library has a way of turning the ordinary into something more. Its windows gave off their familiar glow onto Donegall Square, drawing people inside from the damp pavements. I was there for a lunchtime session on Flight from Prague – The Making of a Refugee, a book that traces one family’s escape from Czechoslovakia between September 1938 and November 1939, and the lifelong shaping of identity that followed.

The talk took place upstairs, the shelves surrounding us heavy with other stories of flight, exile, and memory. The audience was mixed – familiar library regulars, some younger faces, and others who seemed to carry their own connections to displacement. There was a quietness in the room, a listening quality, as Michael Lewis began to speak.

Flight from Prague is not a political chronicle so much as an intimate testimony – the making of a refugee both as a lived experience and as a historical inevitability. Lewis read aloud from his book, his voice carrying the weight of a son’s inheritance: his father, Harry Lewy and mother Edith became figures not just of survival but of transformation. Hearing their story told this way made it clear that exile does not finish at the border; it travels on, shaping the rest of a life.

The conversation did not slip into nostalgia or sentimentality. Instead, it had the texture of testimony – steady, unsparing, yet humane. Lewis connected his family’s flight with present-day movements of people, the refugees who arrive in Belfast now, escaping wars in our own time. The past and present overlapped in a way that gave the session an immediacy beyond memory.

When questions opened, the tone remained gentle. The audience asked with curiosity, yes, but also with care – as though knowing that stories of loss and survival demand a different kind of listening.

Stepping back outside, into the square and the city beyond, I carried the sense that Flight from Prague is not only a story of 1939, but a mirror held up to our world today. The making of a refugee is not just history; it is still unfolding, here and now.

Links:

• Amazon – Flight From Prague: The Making of a Refugee
• Catflap – Book Review
• Linen Hall Library – Flight from Prague: The Making of a Refugee