Leo Eliáš

* 1921

  • “There at Sandrika we got into a direct confrontation with the enemy horde. They were better trained than we were, but you could see that they had had their fill of it too and that they didn’t want to kill us, but they lobbed one frag grenade at us. That blew up into lots of little bits and it was over. I got a lot of them into my head because I didn’t have a helmet, we rebels didn’t have helmets. There was blood everywhere from it. The uprising hadn’t been put down yet. An ambulance came from Banská Bystrica, I was among the ones it took to the main military hospital. There they already saw that things were coming to an end. The commander there was a really responsible and honest chap and he said: ‘Boys, those of you who are from near by, go home, and you who’re from far off, come over there...’ There were twelve of us from far away, maybe fourteen. Then what happened - the commander, or headquarters, secured a transport for us to Sliač, and there I got a place on a military plane of the Soviet Union, as it was at the time, the Red Army, which had been delivering some equipment to the rebels. They took me to Lviv.”

  • “Back then I was in the right place at the right time. I was in the vicinity of Banská Bystrica, where the uprising began, at the time I was sent to work there with other people. We were taken to the city by a partisan leader who then became a high-ranking officer. He took us to Banská Bystrica to show us the uprising. There was great enthusiasm, lots of singing, poems were recited - Hoj, mor ho, mor ho! Detvo mojho rodu [Hey, kill him, kill him! Youth of my blood] by Samo Chalupka... And then he took us to Zvolen. There they dressed us in military clothing and gave us five one repeater rifles, and we became soldiers of the 1st Czechoslovak Army in Slovakia.”

  • “I stayed there one month, I was young and healthy, and then I got a ‘commandeering’, that is a travel order, to Krosno. Krosno was already in the liberated part of Poland and General Svoboda’s headquarters was there. They drafted those of us who came as volunteers into his army; it was called the foreign army in the Soviet Union.”

  • “Well, and there (in the hospital in Lviv) I recovered quickly and I was ready in a month. So I got a travel order, and if it’s of any interest of importance, a small cooking pot, tea, and dried rations. And at every station they had boiling water, so I could make myself tea along the way. I travelled through Rzeszów and Przemyśl, those were cities, to Krosno - the travel order was for Krosno. It was in such territory that I could ask where to go next, I got there very quickly and easily. Well, and they had an enlisting there, it wasn’t just me, there were volunteers from all over gathering to give the Germans a seeing-to.”

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    Ústřední vojenská nemocnice, 25.09.2013

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When you live, you should live in full

Leo Eliáš
Leo Eliáš
zdroj: archiv pamětníka

Leo Eliáš was born on 5 January 1921 in the town of Sečovce in eastern Slovakia. In 1942 he was drafted into compulsory military service in the labour corps, mainly as a digger. At the beginning of the Slovak National Uprising he participated in the celebrations in Banská Bystrica. He applied to join the 1st Czechoslovak Rebel Army and was armed and equipped in Zvolen. He was first posted as a guard for the waterworks in Banská Štiavnica. He was injured while defending the hill above the village of Sandrika. When the hospital in Banská Bystrica was evacuated, he was taken to Sliač, and from there to Lviv by a plane that had delivered military cargo for the uprising. After spending a month recovering in the Kiev hospital, he received a travel order to Krosno in Poland. There, he volunteered in the 1st Czechoslovak National Corps. He served as a guard at the military court, public prosecutor‘s office, and other places. He escorted his superior, Doctor František Vohryzek, on his journeys to the army headquarters. The end of the war found him serving in Liptovský Svatý Mikuláš. His service in the military corps took him all the way to Prague, where he demobilized at the rank of sergeant after about seven months. He started work at the national enterprise Tatra, where he worked as a car repairman until his retirement.