Tag #137875 - Interview #99444 (Ladislav Urban)

The youngest of the Urbans' sons was my father. My father was named Alexander Urban, and was born on 22nd November 1901. As he was the youngest of the entire bevy of children, his uncle, who lived in Alexandria, took over his upbringing. His uncle owned a hat shop, and my father grew up with him. He attended school there for about four years. Thus he also learned languages. He knew seven world languages, both spoken and written. He spoke English, German, French, Spanish, Arabic, Hungarian and Slovak, and could of course read Hebrew. He then began studying business in Vienna, and eventually at a school for diplomats in the Swiss town of Schafhausen. It's still there. It's one of the oldest schools of its type in the world. Many of his classmates later held important political functions, and during their diplomatic visits to Czechoslovakia they'd to visit my father as well. After his father died, my father returned to Piestany to take over the family business. That was around 1931. He lived in Piestany after the war too. He died in the hospital in Bratislava in 1984. He's buried at the Piestany Jewish cemetery, in his parents' grave.

My father also served in the Czechoslovak army. He joined up in Trencin. He told me that they even promoted him. He worked as a laborer in the kitchen. A local Jewish merchant used to supply them with meat. Well, and once it didn't smell good, and they refused to cook it. By the barracks there was an alley with plum trees. They ordered some soldiers over to pick the plums, and made plum dumplings from them. They cooked them out in the courtyard. Their superiors liked the lunch so much that they promoted the cooks. The second time was when they drafted my father during the mobilization in 1938 [4]. But he stayed there for only a short time.