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The photograph was taken during one of our visits to America. It shows me on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls. Back then we were visiting one of my friends. He was named Arnost Cutz. He wasn't a Jew. He fought in the Slovak National Uprising and after the war held leftist views. Unfortunately, in time he realized that the views we had were being put into practice in a different fashion. He didn't see a future for his children in Czechoslovakia, and so he immigrated to America.
After my wife and I met, we set a goal that we'd travel a lot, see the world. That resolution of ours has also been kept. We've traveled through many countries. Our first trip, after the war, was to Switzerland. We actually planned this trip, in 1946, as our honeymoon. It was like a fairy tale. In 1947 we visited Paris. We were lined up there for movie tickets to the world premiere of ?Rebecca" and standing in front of us in the queue was a couple of around the same age. They were slobbering over each other in public. My wife and I didn't know where we should look, it was strange for us. People didn't do things like that at the time here, though now they do. There were years when we weren't allowed to go abroad. So we crisscrossed all of Slovakia and Czechia.
During hard times my wife and I helped our friends who had emigrated after 1968. We obtained various documents for them and sent them to them. Later, to return the favor, they even invited us to the USA a few times. When I was in the Jewish neighborhood in New York, I had the feeling that if I just walked down the street, I'd meet people I know from Michalovce... We were in Israel and in various other countries. One of them is for example Mongolia. Once we were notified at work that there was one free place to go there. No one applied, so I took it. An interesting experience, a Communist country with many Buddhist monks. Unfortunately Mongolia is a very backward country.
