Alexander Gordon

“In 1936 I went to the Charles University in Prague and only came home occasionally for holidays. Despite this, somehow us students already knew about what was happening. When some German refugees came to us we were fully aware of what would happen. I personally was in Prague when Germans occupied it. I was a student of the Charles University. But since I was Slovak they dismissed me and I was told to go back to Slovakia. I came to Bratislava and wanted to enroll at university because I had already been the medical student and I needed to take exams. They didn’t want to admit me because of my Jewish religion. So, till the spring or summer 1939 I stayed in Prague, and then I came back home where it was in high fermentation.”

“Doctor Pelach was the chief doctor of that enterprise and I was appointed to work with him, so we took everything from the aid station, the entire material and carried it to Chopok hill. There we were hidden in the ground on the sidehill. And sometimes Germans strafed us. We used to go with our commander, he never went out alone. The doctor had to follow him everywhere; he checked where the various units were. I went down the Chopok hill to the town of Mikuláš and to that wood where my parents hid out and there I said farewell to them. I told them that Germans followed us and had already dispersed us. So, we were about to run away, thus it was the last time I saw my parents.”

“The situation was much worse in Zohor. We had to work very hard there; we had a predetermined norm because military made money on it. Actually, it wasn’t military on the whole, but the headquarters staff that was responsible for the sixth battalion. And the extent of the drain that we dug there had to be five cubic metres according to the soil quality. One of the guards was from Zohor and he was a very unpleasant man. He threatened us with the freight train; he said if we didn´t meet quotas they would transport us. It was that danger. And we worked hard, of course, and we got a kind of, I would call it military food. However, we never knew when they would transport us away. When the headquarters staff would decide or when they would be forced by Germans, or whatever, just to transport us.”

“So I took the gun and I knew how to charge it and when we went away from the airfield I had a rifle as well. Once somebody showed me how it worked, and then in Poprad when we were at the railway station, Germans bombed us but, let’s say, we didn't stand face to face with them. It happened just from time to time when we were up in the hills, when Germans noticed that we were there. Once I went to the brook wash myself, because we were buried in the trench on the sidehill, so I really needed a wash. And they had to see something and started to fire. Of course, nobody was hurt because it was a kind of indefinite shooting; they didn’t know where exactly we were.

“It was good because, you know, people in our neighbourhood were very kind to us. On the other hand, everybody was afraid that they would transport us. We used to live in that fear for a long time. Nevertheless, we were young, so we didn’t mind it, we got used to hard work. So what, I dug five cubic meters of soil there but as I didn’t do it before, I had to get accustomed. I had calluses, I was strong. So, it was rare that the gaffer threatened us with the words: "Gestapo will show you!" Well, I say sometimes it seemed that we lived there quite well because we made an order there and they let us do that, they were just interested in our work, nothing else.”