Ľudovít Fischer

* 1940

  • "It has intermezzos. Once the Germans came, and then somehow we weren't hidden, I don't know why. Or the first time they came. They preached that all non-natives have to report themselves. There was some, nowadays we would say national committee, or at the town hall it was, in short, they had a commander's office and you had to register. That's what my parents used to say. They were strangers, so they went to apply. 50 meters before, there was a soldier with a machine gun, my dear parents looked at each other and turned around. So apparently from then on we had to hide. Well, the result was that those who had signed in were shot on the way down. So that was the first time we saved our lives. They just didn't like the German soldier."

  • "So the end was quite intense. The last time the Germans came, they were already shooting. By then there were already partisans, I even have the impression...Kaliste was actually liberated by the Romanians, some Romanian unit. I know that they had a machine gun on the roof of our house, that is, that stable. Then we fled into the mountains. There was a gunfire, in short, shots were fired, and my father was wounded. His hand was shot, he couldn't move two fingers for the rest of his life. He was bleeding terribly, so we had to come back from the forest. And the irony is...they were normal civilian clothes, and he was bleeding. The Germans were already in the village. Then a German officer comes along and says, 'Sir, you're bleeding.' Well, hey. He pulled a bandage out of that first aid kit and bandaged his hand. So my father's life was actually saved by a German officer. Because the other roommate was also wounded, and he didn't bleed at all, and he died within two weeks."

  • "I was a very lukewarm party member. I was reproached for not going to meetings, for not being active. When the Russians came and started firing people, they fired a colleague, but I don't remember which one. Well, I wrote a letter saying that I didn't want to be a party member when they dismissed that colleague. I sent it. That's when my father intervened, his colleague - not his diplomat, but his assistant - she was the chairwoman of the party at the time, and she traced my letter."

  • "We used to play there. The Germans were afraid to be in that village for the night. There were never Germans there at night. And the village had one big advantage then. It was at the end of a long valley to the Mostenica, and at one place in that village, where the school was, you could see into that valley. So people knew about two hours ahead that the Germans were coming. Then the peasant... we have a painting of Kalisz by Lehotsky, I can show you, my mother discovered it after the war and, of course, we bought it. That village was on a steep hillside, so all the houses were cut into the ground. Such a typical house ended with such an earthen wall in the stone. And from there the house continued out. So between that wall, so that it wouldn't be damp, they had made a kind of wooden wall out of half-timbering, and there was a space in between. Whenever the Germans went, they hid us in there and piled up the wood, that was the woodshed. A dark woodshed, he used to throw a lot of wood in there. I know this from the story, the Germans actually came, they checked and , of course, they were looking for people. He opened that woodshed, so fortunately they didn't have dogs, the dog would probably have found us. My mother kept my mouth shut so I wouldn't say a word. We actually saw the German, but he didn't see us."

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    V Bratislave, 26.05.2021

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    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of the 20th century
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Period photography
Period photography
zdroj: Archiv pamätníka

Ludovít Fischer was born on 7 January 1940 into a Jewish family of a physicist who studied in Prague and Zurich. After the establishment of the People‘s Republic of Slovakia, he could only work as a teacher. The family was saved from deportation by exceptions. Before the outbreak of the Slovak National Uprising, his father taught at the trade academy in Banská Bystrica. After its suppression, from October 1944, they hid with a peasant in Kalište, who was the father of one of the academy‘s students. Here they narrowly escaped detection several times and managed to survive until the liberation, although their father was seriously wounded during the fighting. Ludovit witnessed the burning of the village. Soon after the liberation, he moved with his parents to Bratislava, where he graduated from eleventh grade in 1957. He decided to follow in his father‘s footsteps - he studied physics at the Faculty of Natural Sciences of Comenius University in Bratislava. During his compulsory military service he joined the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia in 1963. He returned to the faculty, where he worked as an assistant during his studies. After the invasion of the armies of the friendly armies on 21 August 1968, party checks were carried out from the beginning of 1970, during which he was „struck off“ as an inactive party member. He could have remained at the faculty, but his progress was halted. He waited eleven years for recognition as an associate professor. In November 1989, he took an active part in the revolution and was a member of the strike committee. He became head of the department and a few months later was elected vice-dean for science and research. From 1997 to 2003 he was Dean of the Faculty of Mathematics, Physics and Computer Science. He and his wife have three children and seven grandchildren.