Peter Werner

“From when to when... you were actually in Israel at the age of sixty-eight, at the time when the invasion was in Czechoslovakia? Yes. When I left Bratislava because of Israel, at that time when a meeting was being prepared in Čierna nad Tisou between the Czechoslovak delegation and the Soviet delegation, and in fact it was already preparations, but hidden, for the occupation. When I left for Israel, my father told me when the Russians came, so don't come back. And, of course, I looked at my father that what you were talking about, well, and yet the generation of our fathers was more far-sighted, so they were already expecting the development. Well, so when I was, when it came, when the day came, when August 21 came, and we learned that the Russians and allied troops were occupying Czechoslovakia, it was as clear to me, so my parents told me to stay, so I will stay. And given that, to a certain extent, to a certain extent, I felt that I would be freer now, so, so I am, it did not affect me so much, the occupation, in the sense that I would somehow worry about fate, about the fate of parents, for example. They, but at that moment, immediately began to think that they could imagine that the situation would change, as it had been before the Prague Spring, that is, before the Prague Spring, that the borders would be closed, and that there was a problem, there would be a problem, whether they will be able to meet me at all. Well, it was a consequence that after a few weeks, after a week or two, when the post office started working again, telegrams started to go and my parents started calling me back home, to come back. Just in the premonition that the borders will be closed, they will not be able to see me and they will lose their son, so, so they started writing telegrams, and then I am…at first I tried to do something, to argue that I still have this and this I have to do more or less when we, when the occupation came, we were immediately given the opportunity to go to Ulpan, this is a school where Hebrew is taught and we immediately received an offer to study at a university in Israel. Well, of course, I've been dealing with these ideas, so that's how I made excuses ... and I have to do an interview like this, and I'd like to do an interview like that. So I came back sometimes in early October. "

"I, I perceived the pioneering movement, as long as we had good leaders, I thought it was something positive, because there were also meaningful programs there. In a way, we were also led to literature, or at that time such a competition was organized, such as "Direction Prague" was called, and pioneers were to look for, for the heroes of the Slovak National Uprising and look for information on who, where, how fought. And the school which I attended, it had a name of Captain Ján Nálepka, so it was very, you can say a strong tradition… so, so in such a competition, for example, we collected information. We were more or less dedicated to history, so this me, I would still consider it positive from this point of view - that it was of course ideologically oriented, that is clear, but I think the way we were led , looking for materials and studying something, documenting something, so I consider this to be something that for me as represented the positive side. Of course, there were different leaders, it changed every year, and there were leaders who just had no idea what they should have, how to attract those of their pioneers, so this was a period of pioneering organization. Then, when I think I was fifteen, I mean in the ninth grade of elementary school, we could join an organisation, it didn't matter that it had to, but I don't know I don't remember anyone convincing us, it was more or less some, as a matter of course. But by the time I came to high school, at that time, of course, I started thinking about these things as well. Until then, until then, somehow I didn't think about these things, about the political, communist background, but then when, when I'm already a member of organisation, I started to get quite involved there and it was, it was in connection with music . It was the time of Bigbit when we started listening to music, and I went to music school, then I learned to play the guitar myself, so we formed one music group at school. So what… What was her name? We had our band, which was called "Beggars". We had, we had a classmate who learned English, we were again, I learned French as a foreign language at Secondary General Education School , and this friend… we thought what name we should have, so he thought that " Beggars ”, why“ Beggars ”, so beggars. It was related to the development that we are, we each had some musical instrument, we had two guitars, we didn't have a drum, so we drummed on a chair. And now that the organisation meetings came, I started to get involved, but bought us a drum so that we could play drums during our exercises. Well, then we are, then it started to be like that, I would say political, well we don't have money and stuff. Well, I was saying that look, they force us into various activities that we are not interested in, what we are interested in, so you do not want to support us in that. ”