"We did it with my friend by pretending that we didn't want to go to Berlin, that we'd rather stay a day longer, that we didn't want to. We voted, and we were the only ones who voted against going through Berlin. We went to Berlin, we walked there and we came to the Brandenburg Gate and I said, 'Are we going? We can run to the other side. ''No, let's wait, it'll be better.' Then we went back, it started to rain, and we said, 'I want to get a coat,' and he was at the train station. We had suitcases there. So we left the group, went to the Friedrichstrasse station, boarded the S-Bahn and went to West Berlin and came to the Bahnhof ZOO. I get off the train, go downstairs and see a policeman: 'I would like to apply for political asylum.' 'Where are you from?' 'From Czechoslovakia.' 'Oh, yes, you have to go to East Berlin, there's the Czechoslovak embassy.' you misunderstood me, that's where I want to leave. '' Ah, okay, you're in the English sector, you have to go to the English administration.' So I went to the English, and then the system began to take care of us. "
"Everyone knew what was going on. We had Viennese television in Bratislava. We knew exactly what was being done. When the 56th Revolution was in Hungary, I hoped that we would also start a revolution in Czechoslovakia. I went to school every day and said, 'We should join the Hungarians.' But nothing happened. We did not join the Hungarians. That was one thing. The second thing was, once I wanted to escape in such a way ... At that time there was something called Slavonic Day and then Devín was accessible to people. And at the Devín castle is the Morava and Danube rivers. And on the other side of Moravia is Austria. You can't swim cross the Danube, but you can swim cross Moravia. I went there and hid and said to myself that I was going to Austria overnight. Then I lost my courage and went home. But otherwise, almost everyone I met was reliable from our point of view and we could talk to him. And everyone was against communism. I didn't know anyone personally who was a communist to the point that he would betray me. I didn't know anyone. "
"In 1948 I was still in folk primary school. That's exactly what I remember. When the Communists took power, they began to claim that President Masaryk would be satisfied if the working people took power. I told my father. He had a lot of books. He said, 'Look, this is what Masaryk wrote about the Communists.' I read it, I went to school: 'Teacher, what you say is not true. Masaryk was against the Communists. 'The teacher took me aside and said,' You know, now we live in such a time that you can't say what you think and what you know, you have to be very careful. Don't say such things anymore. ‘I remember that well. And due to I know who the teacher was, it was still in that folk primary school. "
"I don't remember, that i was colded, they probably had some blankets, in the snow. I don' remmeber to any horrific situations. I remember there were bandits. They came and wanted to steal what we had, valuables. They didn't notice me as a little boy. My father had a watch and said, 'Take the watch and hide it.' So I took the watch and hid it under a rock. Then they left. They were not partisans, they were robbers, bandits. And after what I described in those memoirs, when those bandits wanted to kill us there. We slept on the ground in one cottage, they came and wanted all our valuables and even took good shoes. Then they drank and shot into the ceiling. Then they went out and took a hand grenade and threw it and they didn't hit the open door. He bounced off, exploded and killed them. So when I was nine years old, I saw people dying in front of me. "
Full recordings
1
Cez Zoom, pamätník žije v Kalifornii (USA), 31.03.2021
Peter Stark was born on March 22, 1935 in Hungary-Germany-Jewish business family in Liptovský Mikuláš. After the establishment of the people’s Slovak Republic, the family converted to the Evangelical faith and thus saved themselves from deportations in 1942. The alcohol refinery was Aryanized and they had to move out of the family villa. After the suppression of the SNP, they and their relatives first hid at the Sirota family, later they lived for five months until their liberation in a cave in the mountains above Liptovský Mikuláš. The refinery was soon nationalized on the basis of Beneš’s decrees, and the family moved to Bratislava, where no one knew them. After graduating from high school, Peter continued his studies at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering of the Slovak University of Technology (SVŠT). He was a member of the Czechoslovak Youth Union and took part in several trips to socialist countries. He visited the GDR in 1956, when during a trip to East Berlin he and his friend probed the possibility of fleeing to the western part of the city. He did so in the summer of 1959. He first underwent interrogations by the French, British and American foreign services before reaching a refugee camp, where he waited for visas to the United States. Until he was finally granted in September 1960, he spent nine months with relatives in Belgium. He got his first job in the city of Syracuse, where he remained working at the university as a doctoral student after an evening master studies. He worked for General Electrics and Texas Instruments in Texas before moving with his wife to California, where he had two daughters and where he lives to this day. His father was regularly summoned to Bratislava for – after his emigration as well as after each of his visits to Czechoslovakia before 1989. After the Velvet revolution, witness often returned to Slovakia, privately and also professionally. At the invitation of a local historian, he and his wife last came to Liptovský Mikuláš in 2010, when they were received by the mayor at the town hall and at the Municipal Museum.
