Ivan Sloboda

"What I should highlight was really people who helped, we mustn't forget that. And I would like to recall one name, I would like it to be written down somewhere. Father and mother were in one of those forest bunkers between Upper and Lower Lehota, and mother had very good shoes, or at least she thought she did. This was very important, it was a matter of life and death, if you didn't have good shoes, your feet would freeze. And mother's sole broke, so they were looking for someone to fix their shoes. Someone advised them that if they were in dire need, they should go to the last or third house from the end in the town of Jasenie, where a very respectable person - Emil Tištian - lives, and that he would help them. The man was a generation older than my father. And so the parents went there, knocked at their house at night to see if they could sleep over, and that was in the worst of times. They allowed them to sleep over, and Mr. Tištian knew how to repair shoes, so he repaired mom's shoes. They may have only been with them for a few days, two or three, but I am convinced that they saved their lives. Both the partisans and the Jews had to eat something, so they went to the valleys, which was always very dangerous, and there they bought bread and other things from the local people. It wouldn't be possible without such people."

+ born on February 8, 1946 in Liptovský Mikuláš + since 1949 he lived with his family in the town of Šahy near the Hungarian border + in 1960 they moved to Bratislava, where he studied electrical engineering + from 1963 he studied electrical engineering at the University of Applied Sciences in Bratislava + emigrated to England in 1968, where he continued to study electrical engineering at the University of Manchester + after his studies he was employed in a telecommunications company in England, after 1989 he worked with the company Český a Slovenský Telecom + in 2022 he laid the Stone of the Disappeared (Stolperstein) to his father Alexander Schwitzer in Luž + in 2022 he lived with his wife in London

"There were many situations in my father's and mother's life when they could leave the country and when other Jews left. And every time they paid for not leaving. My father was 58 years old at the time of the August occupation and he suspected that they had the last chance, that if they didn't leave, they would never leave. Their decision-making was facilitated by the fact that my sister and I were in England and we did not have to make decisions. I don't know if I could go to a completely foreign country at the age of fifty-eight. Father was not the most practical person, but he had big goals. He knew that he had made a mistake in not leaving in the thirty-eighth year, nor later in the fortieth year, nor in the next period around 1964, when many Jews went abroad. Therefore, after August 1968, they decided to leave and they were not alone, many of their acquaintances left. They all then met in Vienna.'