“In order to protect me from that transport, mom bought papers of some German who was owner of a bookstore in Znojmo. His son was a Gestapo bigwig in Greece, and among others, those from the Petschke palace [Prague Gestapo headquarters] asked him whether it’s possible that that father of his had an adulterous relationship with my grandmother and as a result, they had my mother. And he said that it was possible so he helped me indirectly so that I did not need to wear that star.”
“It was a stroke of luck, had he said that no, then…”
“Those indeed were matters of sheer luck or coincidence. It’s not possible… should someone said that they would organise it, they wouldn’t never make it. After the war then, in 1945, my mom went – because he in fact saved us – to that Greece to witness in his favour. And when she arrived there, he just hung on some lamp post. So she went back home.”
„There was a danger that we might be sent to a transport.“
„And how was that delayed?“
„It kept being delayed by that gentleman at Gestapo who couldn’t decide whether we looked like Jews or not. He was a friend of that Willy so he was shielding us. I don’t know how long it was because I was not really following the details.”
“And you went to the Gestapo with her [your mom]?
“Yeah, yeah.”
“And what do you remember, what was it like?”
“They kept measuring us again and again and they kept evaluating it and they couldn’t come to any conclusion.”
“It was humiliating."
“I don’t remember it that well because… Well, mom was really stressed and sometimes it happened that she vented it on me, I got trashed and I had no idea why.”
"When there was peace, it was after the war, in those houses people lived as well, Germans. And those were Germans who opposed Hitler. And I felt it was really unfair when the plundering bands, those who used to be Vlajka members [Czech Nazi organisation] now wanted to show themselves in better light… and then they forced those Germans who were against the Nazi regime all the war, they forced them to clean the streets with toothbrushes. It was horrible, I don’t like talking about it. The end of the war was really bad for us because Franta Bidlo died. He passed away on the 8th. It touched us deeply indeed.”
“Then the coup came and I was deeply touched. I became really anti-Communist, it was really terrible. It went so far that I – and I was a lousy student – studied that Communist philosophy and at the same time, the idealist philosophers and I acted up a lot at that school, that’s true. I acted up, against the Communists, so they kicked me out at the end.”
“And what exactly was happening?”
“Everything angered me. I had a friend at school, one Tomáš Frejka, and his father was executed in the show process with Slánský. And I could barely bear it. It touched me deeply, the show processes with Horáková, with Slánský and people around him. And it was really terrible.”
Walter Fischl was born on the 17th April in 1932 in Düsseldorf in Germany. Both his parents were from Czechoslovakia and they left for Germany for work. In 1933, they divorced, Walter’s mother Lucie Fischlová (née Fischerová) was from a family of German-Jewish businessmen. After the divorce, she returned to Czechosloakia, got a job in Prague and she left her little son with in the care of her mother in Znojmo. In autumn 1938, the Fischer family declared their Czechoslovak nationality depsite knowing that they would lose all their property in the soon to be seized Sudetenland. Walter’s grandmother lost her house in Znojmo as well and the six-years-old Walter moved to his mother to Prague. Mother managed to buy false documents and partially cover the ancestry of both her and her son’s. They still had to call regularly at the Prague Gestapo office in Petschke’s palace and they regularly underwent … background checks whether they fulfill the criteria to be counted as Aryan race. Walter’s grandmother, her youngest son and another daughter and her husband died in 1942 in various concentration camps. During the war, Lucie Fischerová socialised with the leftist artists. Her closest friend was František Bidlo. In January 1945, he was arrested by the Gestapo, imprisoned in the Small Fortress in Terezín where he died on the last day of the war. In February 1948, Lucie Fischlová resigned his membership in the Communist party and then she lost her job. Just before his graduation exam at the high school, Walter was expelled from school for ‘disagreement with the people‘s democracy’. As a politically unreliable individual, he served in the army with the Auxiliary Technical Batallions. After the August 1968 invasion of the Warsaw Pact armies, he decided to emigrate and he and his family settled in Austria. There he worked at the Vienna city council as a construction analyst. At the beginning of his new life in Austria, Walter was supported by his close relative and later Austrian Chancellor, Bruno Kreisky, who, along with his other relatives abroad, was the reason why the State Security harassed him for two years before the emigration. He was listd as a collaborator of the State Security but he denied it. He returned to Czech Republic in 1996, married for the second time and with his second wife, he moved to Plzeň. He died on May 16, 2024.
