Pavel Kaiser

"We had windows facing Jesenského Street. I woke up to some kind of strange sound and it was, I don't know, six or maybe even earlier, and I look down from the window, it was summer, the windows were open, and below were tanks with such a white belt. They were smoking, it was thundering, they were moving all over the place and it was terrible. By then, the radio had already started broadcasting something. Someone from the next house or the opposite house threw something, some bottle or something at those tanks and they started shooting. They turned the machine gun, started shooting, so we immediately crawled to the ground, but our windows were not hit, but somewhere nearby they were. But there was no one dead there then, nothing happened.'

"But a second disaster was coming. Well, I, like basically everyone, had to be in ROH and I was even in ZČSSP to somehow compensate for not being in the party. Well, the ZČSSP was uninteresting, but ROH decided that because I have a brother, that he emigrated, I can't even be a member of ROH and they expelled me from ROH. That was the fall of sixty-eight. They just made a mistake. I looked at the statutes of the ROH and they sent me such a letter that the race committee expelled me from the ranks of the Revolutionary trade union movement at its meeting. And then I read in the statutes that I cannot be expelled by the race committee, but only by the members' meeting, that they have to agree to it at the members' meeting. And I wrote it to them. So they got offended again and put it higher up on some regional or district committee of the ROH or something like that, but then a comrade from that higher committee of the ROH came and called me into some cabinet and said to me: ``Look, Comrade Kaiser''. I didn't correct him because I'm not a comrade, but look Comrade Kaiser, you have two children and you certainly want them to go to school and maybe then to college and so on, so think about it, whether the complaint or the protest that you the race committee kicked him out of ROH and not the members' meeting, if you don't take it back and so on, then think about it again, well.' Well, I changed my mind, so I backed down, and then they kicked me out of ROH in a proper way."

"At first, grandfather couldn't do the medical practice and then they were taken away, they were in the concentration camp in Sereď and the last traces of them were from Žilina, from the train, where my mother traveled quickly and saw them there and saw them for the last time, well. That train had already left, or that transport had supposedly gone to Auschwitz, I don't know, based on my research, maybe Auschwitz wasn't fully operational at the time, so maybe it was Sobibor, but the official place of death and date was set after the war as Auschwitz and I don't know, some date from 1942. Well, so that's how both grandparents ended up."