MUDr. Peter Osuský

"My father and my mother and my uncle Ján Krivoš were members of the University Guard Unit in the Slovak National Uprising and thus all three were objective holders of the so-called two hundred and fifty-five. But they were definitely not involved in any communist movements, because, as my grandfather rightly said: ´Communists did the SNP? And how did they do it? However, in Mikuláš, you would put them on a small rack of everyone.' So mathematically they couldn't do it, and it was done, for example, by the University Guard Department, where the later dean of pharmacy Mandák and other people were. They were, of course, not communists, but Czechoslovak patriots who hated Nazism and the Slovak state as its minion. And that was why they were there, not how the communists appropriated that they were doing the SNP.'

"And at that time, they organized a leaflet campaign by what I guess were twenty-year-old students, at that time it was in the 39th, 40th, that is, my uncle was seventeen years old, but there were also some older students there, classmates from the gymnasium. Of course, as it happens when yonug peoples do it, the perpetrators were tracked down and my uncle was imprisoned by Šaň Mach in Ilava, which at the time was a detention center for opponents of the regime. And there was even a monster trial in Mikuláš, where Šaňo Mach personally came to see that these miscreants were adequately punished and sent to prison. And the performance was held in the presence of the public, who should have come to see how the regime will deal with these beardless men, who we will show how to whistle around the church. So, that was the contact of our family with the regime and with Šaň Mach. And, of course, all the time until the beginning of the uprising, where both my uncle and his sister - my mother, and my father, who was still my mother's boyfriend at the time, got involved, and that was roughly our answer to the regime."

"And we were in Yad Vashem. And so my wife and I were looking at that museum. I am a friend of proper museum viewing. After five hours in the Uffizi gallery, one's legs hurt, but, thank God, at least we can see something of what is there. And so in one of the halls, which was dedicated to the Righteous Among the Nations, we saw what looked like chests of drawers, where each drawer was two centimeters or one and a half centimeters thick. And in each of them were the materials of someone from the Righteous Among the Nations. And now imagine a room where there are hundreds of drawers. Each piece had a column like this with these drawers all the way down and up to a guy's height, and I opened one to see what it looked like, what was in there. And up there was a photograph of a young woman with a child in her arms. And when I looked at her, I said to my wife - Mili, she looks like our class teacher - . When I pulled out the entire drawer, I saw that it was related to our class teacher. That she and her husband adopted a Jewish girl during existence of Slovak state. They saved him.'

"I like the truth about our history, and when I became vice-rector, there was such a stupid sign hanging at the university that Danka Košanová tragically died there. And I said then that I hate that table and it must go away and the truth must go there. And so the management of the university and the rector Gahér told me, so Peter do it. Then it is ordered and done. And so I had to come up with a short, punchy and clear text on two lines, because you can't talk there. The National Remembrance Institute even provided me with the autopsy reports of all three dead people who were shot there, not only Danka Košanová, but also Holík, etc. And so I wrote the sentence that is there now. And that sentence reads: Here, in the fire of the Soviet occupiers, lives were extinguished. In other words, it is finally the only place in Bratislava where the truth is written, the clear truth, and not that she tragically perished. Because you will die tragically, even if a tile from the fourth floor falls on your head from the roof of the university. But this was murder, that is, this is a big difference. And Peter Legner still has a lying sign at the entrance to the Main Post Office, and I'm glad that at least this one is true. And that it is at my university, and that my management absolutely supported me and agreed that we put that table there. And on the other hand, we hung it in cooperation with VŠVU, whose dean himself proposed the subject, a board to our students who were engaged in the struggle for democracy the day before November seventeenth.