Peter Bednárik

“Well, that was much harder, as there was a war. The goods were rationed and people had to hand in wheat from every thresher. Those six years were hard. Well, nothing could be done about it, it was war. They took everything. But who was hardworking back then and was able to raise 10 big pigs for the slaughterhouse in one year, he could almost build a house for that earning. There were people who carried on business. In Bratislava and other cities everything was just rationed and so people went shopping to villages. There was one diligent man here, who used to buy out fattened geese. He would take them to Bratislava and earned great money for that. Although, such people were often caught for profiteering. They had to be smart. So when in Bratislava, such man went down the tunnel, not through the building, he would be stupid to do that, and the buyers already waited for him, gave him lot of money and he could go and bring the next deal. Such things were done, you know. Black market. It was lack of flour, so a deal was made. An express train stopped at midnight here for a little while. The station was closed at night. The stop was called Majer. Three sacks of flour were placed in the locomotive as it was impossible to put it anywhere in the cars. At the train there was a constant control. As everyone was sleeping at night in the train, the flour was moved to the engine, dropped off in Žilina and brought here on horse-drawn wagon. People who had acquaintances could do that. That´s how the supplying system functioned. Everything was rationed. And the ration then lasted even after the front´s crossing.”

“I wasn´t home just for 14 days, but for a month! I had to enrol and since they knew I was allowed to be at home only for 14 days, some rat reported me to Germans. When I came there, directly to the jail, it was full. So I was placed to one room, where we played cards. They even took my belt, this rule was given by law, so that no one would hang himself. All the belts, strings, laces had to be handed in. On the third day a service came. ‘Jailbirds, out! Line up for fatigue duty!’ We came to the courtyard, the gate opened and I saw soldiers marching from the town towards the barracks. Suddenly I looked better and those were the guys I left from. They assigned us to their unit and the scenario repeated – marching back behind the Danube. And I questioned myself back then, why hadn´t I gone with Mišo as I could have been home already. But a ʻstotníkʼ came, (now we say it was a captain, but back then Slovaks couldn´t adopt any words from the Czech, so there wasn´t čatár, but čatník (sergeant-major) and not a captain, but stotník). And the stotník said: ‘Guys, I need eight signallers, in the morning we are heading to Nové Mesto nad Váhom, where is a hyperpark. There we will be issued the telephone material and we go to Šaštín, where the government shall be evacuated, so we will install the phone lines in private houses.’ And so I enrolled, even though I wasn´t a telecommunications worker. Anyway, we knew everything. We had radio operators as well as signallers.”

“When we arrived in Romania, the Germans began to disarm us in a village Deda. We didn´t know what was going on. However, one officer came and said: ‘Guys, do not protest, just lay down your arms. There was an uprising against Germans in Slovakia.’ Thus they disarmed us as unreliable ones. That was in the evening and we didn´t even have a place to sleep. We wanted to find lodgings there, but the Germans placed us to a meadow behind the village. There was a creek, so at least we had some water as they didn´t give us any food for three days. That´s how they thanked us for helping. Fortunately, there was a corn field, it was on August 29. So we picked the corn and cooked it in our helmets. That´s how we survived. Some guys managed to run away from there as they had trucks. There were some vehicles, but I don´t know what kind of arms those were. Probably an intelligence service. It was set, that within certain kilometres there was a transmitter in a truck. That´s how the information transmitted to the reserve division and from there they sent us commands. They were 200 km behind the frontline. It was not possible to drag it through the line. I don´t know, what coverage the transmitters had, but when they commanded, it went directly to the front. That´s how the radio transmitters worked. So, we got to that Romania and we were disarmed. Then they gave us spades, shovels, pickaxes and defined where the trenches should be dug in case of retreat. Three meters per a man. A zigzag trench we called it, about 3.5 meters deep. We had to use pickaxes where it was impossible to use spades. It was a very hard work and we had to manage it in one day. If we didn´t, we had a problem. Yet, that´s how we came to Hungary.”