Ladislav Welward

"My father converted to the Catholic faith in order to save the family. So I was born a Jewish child, but two years after my Jewish baptism, I was rebaptized into the Catholic faith. Why do I say this? I say this because, despite the fact that I had a very deep Jewish background - even though my father was not Orthodox - but some principles were adhered to, after this baptism I was actually raised as a Catholic child. So the mental split that affected me was gradually quite difficult for me. The environment in which I lived, the people with whom my parents met, were mostly of Jewish origin, but my upbringing at school, despite the fact that I was still considered a Jew as a child and they still beat me like a Jewish boy... So this left a rather severe trauma in me. Because it was so unbalanced. My poor mother, who was amazing, helped me a lot in this situation. woman. Then I will explain to you what she did in some situations during the war was excellent and truly extraordinary. My mother knew how to guide me so that I was more or less like a Jewish child of the Catholic religion, I guess that's how I will put it to you."

"Three months after his death, at night, we were just here with my mother, a commando came to this apartment. We didn't know who they were, five civilians, it must have been about two o'clock in the night, they put us in our pajamas, in this room where we are now, each one against a wall, their heads against the wall and said: -This is how you will be-, and they were making a coup in the apartment. They searched, searched, searched. We weren't even allowed to say a word, we weren't allowed to say a word and then one of them shouted at my mother: -Where is Dr. Welwalrd?- . And my mother again showed amazing courage and said: -You can look for him, he's about two kilometers from here. -Where specifically?- the one shouts. And my mother said: -He died three months ago, he's buried in the Men's Cemetery near the Old Castle-. He got angry, he was furious, they were throwing things around even more. Then he said -Leave-, and as they were leaving out, so one of the secret agents was late and my mother stopped him and said: –For God's sake, tell me what happened? –And he said to her: –Madam, we are carrying out a raid on former officers of Béla Kun's army throughout the republic and your father is on the list, your husband, so be glad that he is no longer among the living–. They took all the senior officers, there were very few of them here. They took Béla Kun to Moscow, this was Stalin's order, where he was executed. Then they liquidated those officers, so my father would have ended up like this, so the time has come for us again to be Kun's people".

"Father had an exception, so it was easy. And then the informers came along and started writing to the ministries that a Jewish family lived here, who were baptized, but were still Jewish in spirit, behavior and thinking. I had already obtained these reports, I have them. Direct letters that were written to the minister. That's when the situation started to get really bad. They no longer took into account that we had an exception. My father was taken to the camp in Nováky in about 1943, I don't know exactly, or at the beginning of 1944. There was also a Jewish camp in Nováky. At that time, they only took my father, my mother and I stayed here. And what happened there? Bad luck again, fear. The guards from Štiavnica were on duty at the gatehouse, and when they noticed that a Jewish doctor had been brought from their town, someone must have had a crush on him, they immediately beat my father up terribly to welcome him. But terribly. My father had a stroke defeat. Mom found out about it through some spies from the camp, expanded her spheres of interest and acquaintances and managed to get my father out of there. But in a half-dead state after a stroke. He couldn't walk, in a word, from then on my father was disabled until his death, he dragged one leg a little behind him, but he got over it. So then my father came here for about a year and a half, when we had some peace, because we were out of sight. Mom and dad were so thoughtful that we weren't in the apartment here, but mostly we were in various villages."

"I was an engineer for about two years, a young engineer, and young engineers at Biotika had to work as workers at first. In shifts. I was at night. I worked there as an ordinary worker. A commando came there at night, a communist commando, and they took one of my colleagues. And we didn't know what was happening. After a few weeks, we learned that in Bystrica they were digging up a cinema that was collapsing and they found a box that contained the POHG archive. And in that archive they found lists of all the people who participated in the executions in Kremnička from the Slovak side. And there was also a colleague there who had previously been a director for the Slovak State, a director for a period of merit in Šporiteľňa, but then he was in the emergency department of the Hlinka Guard, in the one that did the murders. And they came to take him away. Imagine, then, when I reflected on it, I worked here on a shift for several weeks together, "I don't want to name him that gentleman. And maybe he was my grandmother's murderer."

"I don't know what I ate, I don't know how long I was there. Everyone asks me how long. I don't know, it was dark there. Only then did a terrible thing happen: the Štiavnica guards found out that we were hiding there. This Mr. Podest was told by other guards, who were polite, that they were going to take Omama and me. Podest ran there and said: 'Come quickly, because they will come for you in a moment.' I always had to be very disciplined and my grandmother guided me to do this, because I had a small backpack next to me, where I had the most important things. I cleverly took the backpack and dragged my grandmother to go. And my grandmother said: 'I can't do it, I'm not going with you.' And Podest told her: 'You have to, because time is of the essence.' She said: 'Leave me here.' So he caught me, took me, hid me for a while for about a day or two and through all sorts of "He contacted my parents through complex but very reasonable contacts. Imagine! The father told him through the contact: 'Bring your son to the camp.'"

"That journey would also be a novel to write about. Because we went right after the war with the Red Cross. I remember Germany as ruins. We had to go through Germany to Buchs, where we had a Red Cross quarantine for two weeks and then they put us in families in Switzerland. Until we got to Buchs, we went with that train where the tracks were still passable or partially passable again, they had to guard us. After the war, there were still a lot of desertions in Germany, on that train there were armed Czechoslovak soldiers and Czech nurses with us. I don't know how long we went, about a week, crammed into those trains. They took care of us, it was terrible. There were two terrible shocks for me: the first shock was when they took me from Štiavnica through Trenčianske Teplice as a child. In Trenčianske Teplice, Slovak children gathered for this Red Cross trip and took us to Prague, where Czechoslovak children were. In Prague, they accommodated us in of the former camp – it was a small concentration camp. When I saw the buildings, it immediately approximated my impressions that I had before, so I got a shock there, I was completely finished. The nurses must have been worried about me, I couldn't eat, I didn't know anything. I was depressed. And even more depressed when we got to Buchs by train. There was another camp there. That quarantine camp was for two weeks, although it was more humane, the conditions were better. There were also Swiss Red Cross nurses there. We were there for two weeks, I also had a hard time taking it there. And especially the fact that I wasn't with my parents. After all that stress, I was very attached to my parents. And then I ended up in this family. I ended up in that family as the underdog, something always has to go wrong. From Buchs, they were taking a group of about 20-30 children to Basel. In Basel, at the station, the families that the Red Cross had already committed to were supposed to be waiting, that they would take the children with them. All the children's families came and I saw that the head of the Red Cross was running around very nervously. Nothing, no one came. I stayed at the station with the head of the Red Cross and she said: 'Then you come with me, you will stay with me.'"

"By coincidence, I was living in a room with a classmate who was a high-ranking communist, a high-ranking one. And he was the chairman of the SZM at the faculty. And the one above me and my friend, who I mentioned to you, who had studied and lived with me since childhood, held the patronage. And he told us: 'You two are both such assholes, keep your mouths shut, but I know you can't do it.' So he forbade us, despite the fact that we had mandatory one-month shifts, and said: 'You won't go to any shift, you won't go to any evening school of Marxism-Leninism, you'd make a fool of yourself there. I'll hold the patronage.' And he did. I had a very good time with him, he was a high-ranking communist, a high-ranking one. What happened next: I was the chairman of that student scientific society and there was the Union of Czechoslovak-Soviet Friendship at the faculty. And they lost their chairmanship. Years before, I had written refused to join the ZČSSP on the grounds that there were former guardsmen in Štiavnica, and that I would not join. So I was at peace. But this Riko came to me: 'From tomorrow you will take over the agenda of the ZČSSP, you are the chairman of the entire faculty.' Even among the professors. So I was the chairman for about half a year as a non-member. They didn't even notice that I was not a member."

"My father had bad luck there. The bad luck of life, that he got caught at the gatehouse, which was occupied by guardsmen at the time. Coincidentally, guardsmen from Štiavnica were on duty there and they wanted to show off what they were and to vent their complexes. They beat my father up right there. But they beat him so badly that my father stayed, he hadn't even been actually settled in the camp yet, they beat him so badly at the gatehouse that my father got a concussion, they partially damaged his brain. He was unconscious for a long time, but he was alone in the camp. My mother found out about it and managed to get my father out of the Novák camp as an invalid, and the doctors gradually treated him there, but he remained disabled for the rest of his life. His leg was partially paralyzed and it wasn't the same anymore."

"This gentleman, Jozef Podest, Podest was his name. He was a former retired railway worker who, when he saw that the guards were already coming to take away my mother and me, this gentleman Podest came at night. I was able to pack a small package, my mother, and he took us, hid us from here not far from here in a house belonging to Timfeldovsky. It was an old Jewish house. They had been taken to Germany a few weeks before that. The whole house was empty and this gentleman knew that there were cellars under that house. He hid us, my mother and me, in that cellar. We were and we lived in complete darkness, it wasn't life, but we were just there and he took care of us in such a way that from time to time he would bring some bread or something, just basic food, to the garden that was by the cellar at night so that no one would see us. And my mother ran out at night when it was dark so that no one would see us, she took "the food and we had it in the basement."

"After years when all the files were deliberately blocked, especially here in the Štiavnica archives, where we wanted to learn something and couldn't, I managed to get to the archives in Bratislava through various means, where good people who, after the Gentle Revolution, I mean after the Velvet Revolution, when it was no longer under the patronage of those former prominent people, guardsmen and so on, managed to get to the files about our denunciation. I have those files. It's something incredible, because the first denunciations that came from Banská Štiavnica were signed by an anonymous person who signed himself as a Guardsman from the front. This was his anonymous signature. A Guardsman from the front. And in the first text that I have, he writes to the Minister of the Interior that here in Štiavnica is the family of Dr. Welward - but now the denunciation is not against Dr. Welward, but a vengeful text against my mother - and his wife. And he mentions that wife many times there, no "The father, but the wife, who is still here and they were not taken to the camp. This was one report. Other reports went to the gendarmerie station."

"It was completely divided into sectors, but there were also children. There were also women, but mostly men. And according to what we later learned, it was a group of more intellectual Gypsies. They were mostly musicians, who were simply picked up by their fiddle and taken to the camp. Children. One such episode from life in that camp: It was Christmas in 1944 and the Slovak soldiers were seized by such a fit of humanity that it was Christmas. So out of nowhere they came to the part where we were, to the tiny one, and let a few Gypsy children in there with me. Gypsy children. That was my first contact with children after a long, long time."

"The front was already several kilometers long. The Gestapo wanted to escape from Dubnica as soon as possible and were preparing to leave their headquarters. And the two Gestapo asked in German: "What about them?" And the commander said: "Shoot them!" Mom grabbed my hands, very calm, she just said to be calm. They were about to take us out, when another officer arrived, another, higher-ranking one, who was already running with his suitcases into a car so he could disappear from Dubnica. And the officer asked them: "What are you doing here?" They said: "We have these here, with this order." The soldier shouted at them, the officer, and at us: "Disappear immediately!" He opened the door of the gatehouse and said "disappear", imagine. So that's how we saved ourselves."