Mgr. Lucie Lucká

"But in '68 a few of these Italian communists came, on exchange, and we really took care of them here, in the sense that we gave them a few tours of Prague or something. Believe it or not, they were leaving on August 21, 1968 at 10 o'clock from Wilson Station, I mean from Main Railway Station. And all the time we were having a discussion with them, with the Communists, about whether or not the Russians were going to invade us. And they laughed at us, they mocked us, they said: 'You are fools, why would they do that, that's nonsense, the International Brigade would never allow that...' Well, they just had no idea of the reality of what communism was, or the Soviet Union. So they left, they got on that train, they didn't even cross the border properly and the Russians were already here. Then I got a letter from one of those communists, his name was Gustavo de Mari, I still remember that. He lived in Naples, Parco Comola 61, I don't know why I remember this kind of stupid things, but it somehow sticks in your head. And he wrote that he was terribly sorry, that he understood, that he would never have believed it, well, just a sort of apologetic letter for the ridicule they had towards our fears, which I think were real. But of course we believed that there would be no invasion, but there just was. Well, at the end of that letter, he wrote to me and said if it would help me and if I wanted to, he was offering to marry me so that I could leave. So I thanked him and said that was awfully nice of him, but that I wasn't planning anything like that. Well, that's how it was in '68, for me.

"That reminds me of a story my dad used to tell. When he was coming back from Buchenwald and he got to Prague in his blue prison uniform, because he had nothing else, he was on a tram and the conductor came and my dad said, 'I have nothing.' He said, 'All right, go.' And when he got off and went to my mother, to my family, he realized that he had a hundred crowns in his pocket, that someone had put a hundred crowns in his pocket."

"He wanted to escape to the West, to the Western army, but he didn't manage to do that, he was caught on the border with Hungary, he was put in prison there, then he was sent back to Slovakia to Ilava, it's just a complicated thing. Anyway, it ended up that my dad adopted a different identity during that wartime period. He changed his name, made fake papers, helped others to make fake papers for them, take them accros the border to Hungary, because at that time it seemed that Hungary was not as hostile to Jews as Slovakia was, and that's how he managed to survive. Because when the partisans liberated him from the prison in Ilava in 1944, he, because he had nowhere to go, he couldn't go to his family, so that his family wouldn't endanger him, because they had different identities, so he joined the partisans in the Slovak National Uprising, and it was only there, I think it was at the end of August, that they were captured. He fought with a small partisan brigade, or a detachment at Strečno. There they were guarding the gorge where the train was supposed to go, and they blew it up. And he described the incredible heroism of the French soldiers in particular, who had come there from some camp that was in Silesia, how they fought like lions, taking some incendiary weapon, for example, and jumping on German tanks to set the tank on fire, even at the cost that the man would die too. They also have a memorial there at Strečno, those French soldiers. And so they were there for about a month or something like that before they were captured, because the German superiority was enormous, and immediately, of course, they were sent to a concentration camp, and the closest one, which was Auschwitz. But because of this changed identity, my father did not appear as a Jew, and therefore he was not sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau, to Birkenau, but to Auschwitz, to the 'normal' concentration camp, where, as my father told me a lot about it, people did die, they died of hunger, of disease, of beatings, but there were no gas chambers, so it was not the extermination part."