Tag #135811 - Interview #100829 (Tibor Engel)

My memories of the first half of the 1950s are very unpleasant. It was another stage in the persecution of Jews, under the guise of anti-Zionism. My father was even jailed for a week in connection with Slansky [26]. In 1951 my mother was preparing to take me to Prague. My health wasn’t completely in order. In the store that my father managed worked the wife of the Kokava police chief. They were probably the informers who construed a supposed contact with Slansky out of my mother’s planned departure for Prague. One Saturday, when I was a tech school student, the secret police [27] came, searched our house, and took my father with them. The next Saturday, when I came home from school, my father came home. He never wanted to tell me what he’d experienced. But apparently it wasn’t easy, all I know is that they wouldn’t allow him to lie down. They forced him to stand on one leg. They didn’t shut off the light in the cell and so on. After a week they released him.

In 1965 I joined the Party. A political thaw was beginning, and I believed that one could survive there. In a certain fashion I joined out of belief, not to mention there being also a bit of careerism in it. But it didn’t last long for me. By 1969 I was already thrown out; I was disobedient, rebellious.

I perceived the arrival of democracy in Czechoslovakia after 1989 as a very positive thing. The most important thing for me was that the barrier between Israel and Slovakia completely disappeared, and at last I could communicate normally with my relatives. The border with the West also opened up. After the fall of Communism, I felt and also feel much freer. Currently I’m a member of the Jewish religious community in Nitra. My old friends are there, whom I get along with very well.