Eva Ochodničanová

I remember the funeral of Stalin, when a coffin covered with a black cloth was displayed in our cultural centre. And my brother says to me: imagine Comrade Stalin lying in the house of culture. I say, listen, he's not lying there, it's just a clean coffin. But those children believed that Comrade Stalin was lying on the plaster in Podolínec in the House of Culture. That was interesting, because we started in 48, and we had crosses on the walls, and we used to pray in the morning and after we finished the school day, and then from one day to the next the crosses disappeared and they were replaced by Gottwald and the five-pointed star. Our mother came to school and she heard the screaming of me, eight years old: don't take the crosses away from us. So I was a fervent Catholic then. And then we took that pioneering, that we were like Zoya Kosmodemianskaya (a partisan, devoted to Salin)) and Pavlik Morozov (a pioneer who denounced his father and was murdered, ed. note), we just had our Timurov squads, we helped the old people, even if they didn't want us to help them carry their groceries. So we were excited then. I know as a pioneer I was a terribly proud pioneer. So we were brainwashed completely. But we snapped out of it by listening to the foreign news.

Among his patients there was a woman who came from Bielsko-Biała, she was under 40 years old at that time and she left civilization, she didn't want to work as a clerk and wanted to live as a hermit. So she had a wooden cottage built near there in the village of Durstin, outside the village, in a little forest, there was a little hill, Skalka it was called, and she wanted to live a life without civilization, without radio, news, and just devote herself to her faith and to doing good deeds. And she said to him one day, 'Doctor, if things would become bad, I'm here and come to me.' Dad took it as something people say, but would not follow with in need, but... But that night, when the customs officers came and told him to take his wife and child and to run away, they still helped him to bring his suitcase, in which he had things, basic necessities and medical things, and they went to the mountains to Mrs. Mieczyslawa. She wrote a diary, and in her diary she wrote, that it was night, he was knocking on her door and she said to herself who could it be in the middle of the night... And there stood my father with my mother and me in his arms, I was two years old at the time, and they told her that we would stay here overnight and then we would find a bunker in the forest, with the branches of the coniferous trees we would cover up. And she told him, doctor, the forest ends somewhere, you stay with me. That she was... from it... that she was shaking with terror, because she realized that we were all in danger of if they found us there. My father told her, if they come, you will be in danger too, they might kill you too and she told him, we will hold hands and go to heaven together.