Martin Rodan

1968 – occupation of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact troops. This is of course a traumatic experience for anyone who was more or less adult at the time, and I also remember it. I was in France when the Soviet army came to Czechoslovakia. I wanted to use the free time and visit France, whose language I was studying, and there on August 21, 1968, when I was supposed to return and I had bought a ticket that I bought in Slovakia with Czechoslovak money, because otherwise I received some 15 dollars for the trip and it was one big adventure to live there. On my way to the Gare de l'Ouest station, I saw a tabloid newspaper sold by such childish peddlers near the station, and there was one huge headline: Prague occupée par les Russes et coupée du monde - that means Prague is occupied by Russia and cut off from of the world. That train didn't run that day. After that, in a few days, trains started running, but only to the borders of Germany, because for some time it was not possible to travel to Czechoslovakia at all. So I had no way out, I decided to stay in Paris. And I must say it was quite similar. I had quite similar experiences, now it comes back to me, as those Ukrainians, Ukrainian refugees are experiencing now after the attack of the Russian Federation on Ukraine.

However, because it was considered a holocaust memorial, the local chapter of the Anti-Fascist Fighters Union held a ceremony there, and it was my father who was chosen to speak there and give the speech for which he was later in trouble. Apart from him, no one wanted to speak there, and in fact, the solemn ceremony was largely carried out as a reading of the names of the Žilina Jewish victims of the Holocaust, whom those present at the time also mostly knew personally. I will only state that the writing and reading of the names of the victims, which today is part of the reading of the names of the victims during Holocaust Memorial Day every year, actually started in Žilina and then Prague took over and later it spread all over the world. My father, as I mentioned, had a lot of trouble with it, they also wanted to throw us out of that apartment in the boarding house. He was just afraid that he would be arrested, so he always went to sleep in warm stockings during the winter nights of 1952/53, because they said that when they came to arrest him, they wouldn't let him wear warm stockings, and apparently it was quite cold there in those prisons . But somehow they got through it. Even for me personally as a child, the 1950s were difficult.