Juraj Fischer

This is a photo of my husband, Juraj Fischer. The photograph was taken in Lucenec at the end of the 1930s. My husband left the country as a nineteen-year-old when the persecution of Jews was just beginning. In later years, he gave only one longer interview, in 2004, to the weekly Domino forum. In it he described his life story. The story of the escape of a Jewish boy at the start of the war from his hometown of Lucenec, the story of a journey filled with hardships through the Balkans and the Middle East to France, where he took part in Operation Dynamo by the French harbor town of Dunkerque. From there he went to England, where he joined the Czechoslovak Army. After the landing at Normandy, on 6th June 1944 he took part in Operation Overlord. After returning home, when he found out that his loved ones had died in concentration camps, he ended up at the beginning of the 1950s as an accused ?saboteur? of the Communist regime in the uranium mines at Jachymov. He survived it all. He also survived the fact that after 1989 the courts of a democratic country weren?t capable of seeing justice done, and compensate him for the fact that their family's home in the center of Lucenec had been confiscated during the war on the basis of race laws of Szalasi's fascist government. The work of the Nazis was topped off by the Communists with an unbelievably shameless act, when they applied a decree on the confiscation of the property of Nazis and their collaborators against a hero of the anti-Fascist resistance! As if it wasn?t enough, in 1996 the District Court in Lucenec refused his request for compensation with the argument that he wasn?t the owner of the house: according to the laws of the Fascist Szalasi regime. But the fate of their house had come to an absurd end long before ? when in 1975 they tore it down and on its property built the building of the Regional Committee of the Communist Party of Slovakia. Somehow too many symbolic events!