Ladislav Chudík

* 1941

  • "Well, of course they wanted me [to join the party or cooperate with the Staty Security]. I've never been in any party in my life, I've never signed anything - never in my life - I don't know that I've been registered as a State Security officer or anything like that. But that I was investigated by a twenty-four-year-old fucker, and he still told me that I don't want to tell my wife where I am, what I'm doing here, what we're talking about, and it was twenty-one times. And he asked me to sign a paper. So I won't say this anymore, because it's a very ugly word, but I told him, 'Mr. colleague, get a grip' - as you hear me - 'get a grip, go to Prague to your girl, have a good night with her, and stop bothering me, because I’m not coming back here again.’”

  • "Normalisation meant nothing to me because I was already moving into a completely different world. I understood the processes that were happening in our society, I read and listened to everything, but they didn't touch me any more. I was just afraid that my children would get into something unnecessarily, I preferred to try to drill into their heads that they should try to get an education. But not one that would get them a degree, but one that they would understand the subject they were studying. To drill down into the subject matter that they're going to be practicing someday in life. To prepare them that it may happen that one day your father (like me) may leave his native land, which I did, not because I hate you or because I hate the Republic, but I cannot work here."

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    Poprad, 30.03.2023

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    duration: 04:19:13
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You can’t do it without egoism

Ladislav Chudík was born on September 17, 1941 in Banská Bystrica to Magdalena and František Chudík. After the family was expelled from Banská Bystrica after the dissolution of the Slovak state, they moved to Velké Lomnice, where they acquired a house and a business inherited from the expelled Spiš Germans. In 1952 the business was nationalized and both parents had to take up jobs in state-owned enterprises. After completing his primary education, he studied cello at the Conservatory in Košice, and from 1964 to 1966 he performed compulsory military service in Považská Bystrica. After the war he joined the Košice Radio, played in the State Chamber Orchestra Žilina and the Di archi Slovakia Chamber Orchestra, with whom he toured the world. He and his wife had three children. In 1979 he moved to Egypt, where he was sent via Slovkoncert Bratislava of the MV CSR and lived until 1989. Shortly before the revolution he returned to Czechoslovakia, again working in the Žilina State Chamber Orchestra, occasionally working as a porter in the High Tatras. Throughout his life he was a mountaineer. In 2023 he lived with his wife in Poprad.