Mikuláš Tóth

"After three months, we were deployed to individual border companies. I was assigned to the ninth company in the then border village of Devín. The emphasis has always been on the class enemy and the potential violator of state borders. They kept emphasizing this to us. But the significance of this was a little perverted, because they told us that the main enemy was abroad, that some agents, spies, would come to us from the capitalist countries and would harm our socialist establishment. It took us a long time to realize who we would protect the state border from and in what way. We thought that the pressure would come from abroad to the interior and that we would be facing abroad. And that there will be pressure from some soldiers, armies, or such, as I mentioned, agents and such. But the opposite was true. When we joined the border companies, the pressure was the opposite from the interior to the rest of the world, and not the other way around. We had our backs turned and faced inland. "

"As for the the service at the state border, it could not have been made easier in any way, because if someone were to ease it in some way, it would harm both himself and his colleagues, whom he practically had in the service. The border patrol also had a neighboring patrol on the left and right, and if one did something wrong at their post, the two neighboring patrols could pay for it. So it was impossible to not notice something in the observation zone that I was supposed to observe, because when I did not observe it and I let it go to the right or to the left, the one on the right or left caught it, or not. And then, in retrospect, it would be checked how he could have gotten into the second observation zone when he passed me, for example. I explained this kind of quickly, that it was not good to treat it in such a way as to make something easier in such a service, because there was then a punishment for the border guard, from a ban on outings, to three days in prison, to the prosecutor. So there was no way out of it. And what’s more, members of the counterintelligence were deployed there, and they watched us serve. From the ranks of our soldiers. I only learned this in civilian life, that they had agents from our ranks who signed a service with them, and they monitored us. They just spied on us. These were the correspondents of the internal counterintelligence from the Bratislava Brigade. "