Avri Fischer

* 1935

  • “In October, two SS-men came at night into the flat where I was sleeping. They asked whether there was someone else besides the registered residents of Mr Chovan and his wife. I didn’t remember the name Chovan but looked it up later. Mr Chovan told them, ‘Yes, there is a child. A boy from East Slovakia.’ I had false documents in the name of František Falada, born in Humenné. The story was that I had lost my parents, as an orphan got to Bratislava and the Chovans were asked to take me as an adopted child, so that I had a roof over my head. The SS-men told him, ‘We want to see the child.’ I pretended I was asleep but I was tense because I heard everything. They came up to my bed. They aimed their torch at me. And one says to the other, in German, ‘This child does not look like a Jew, what do you think, Hans?’ And the other replied, ‘You are right, let him sleep.’

  • “We were both happy with the system of the Kibbutz movement. We thought it was integral to the Kibbutz way of life, that the Kibbutz education of children in child home is an integral part of the movement. When I look at it from distance and when we talk to our children, we feel that there are things we didn’t feel or see them. We regret that we didn’t have time to be with our children to experience the warmth of home in our privacy. But I must tell you that it was not just a question of ideology. Practical things were involved too. We had, my wife and I, only a small room, four metres long, three metres wide, twelve square metres. There was no water, only outside, there was no toilet and there was no room for children either.”

  • “We walked through the streets of Bratislava and I was so trained that whenever we went to visit friends of my parents, I would never walk hand in hand with them, because they had a star and I didn’t. I would walk eight, ten metres behind them and I would always see them and we would meet only at the very destination. I knew I was not to be with my parents and they told me that whenever anything happens, they were stopped, asked for documents etc., they asked me not to panic. They told me, ‘In such case, you’ll turn and return to aunt Ica, the non-Jewish wife of my uncle. She will know what to do.’”

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Years of uncetainty what next minute will bring

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Avri Fischer
zdroj: natáčení ED 2017, archiv pamětníka

Albert Avraham, now Avri Fischer, was born in Vienna in 1935 and grew up in Bratislava. His father Desider David Fischer worked as a baby doctor and the consultant at the Jewish hospital in Bratislava. His mother was named Lilly, née Perl. His uncle Gusta Fischer became one of the very first victims of Slovak anti-semite sentiments. He was attacked in the street by a group of thugs, suffered serious head injuries to which he later succumbed. His father’s sister was a well-known leader of the local Jewry. Around 1940 the Fischers had to leave their luxurious flat in today’s Hviezdoslav Square. The moved to a villa on the Bratislava hill. Avri attended the neolog Jewish school but after the second year the school was closed. Most of the children and teachers were taken to transports. A Jewish boy was not allowed to transfer to the state school. Out of the initiative of his parents, he attended classes in the family of engineer Krasňanský. His father’s profession protected them from the transport. Same as many other Jewish professionals, indispensable for the Slovak State, he received a certificate of being excluded from transports. This held until September 1944 when they had to go into hiding. His parents survived to the end of the war in a refuge built in the warehouse on their neighbours’ garden. Avril spent the day with one family, the night with other. One night, however, there was a Gestapo raid. The boy escaped only thanks to his Aryan look and false document. He then changed his place of refuge. Immediately after the war Albert joined the youth Zionist movement, determined to leave for Israel just after his school-leaving exam. Everything was sped by the communist coup. He left in 1949 with the consent of his parents and found his new home in the Kfar Masaryk kibbutz. He got married after completing his military service in 1955. He worked as a teacher in leading positions of the Kibbutz movement.