Karol Janoštiak

* 1938

  • “My grandma said, 'Let´s go'. It was time. He packed up the bellows and took the boat. He had this small boat. He quickly inflated it and tied it. Then, I rushed to tie it around a tree. When he got off at the Austrian side, I pulled the boat back, deflated it, folded it up and ran back home. A person saw me from the signal box. 'What was that idiot doing there, standing next to the window?' He was supposed to be looking at the railway. And he had seen us leaving before. We hadn´t noticed. And on the way back, it was only me who returned.”

  • “The Prague Uprising (the witness probably means protests) against Gottwald caused quite a stir. They were giving out sentences. And there was this student. He was about to graduate, so he joined in the protests. He was amongst the group that organized the uprising against Gottwald, therefore he was amongst those who were supposed to be executed. And they did execute the students who were part of the committee. He managed to escape. His name was Boris Šrerka. They were getting closer to him. But he got together with my mom´s cousin Betka and she brought him to us. Naturally, he had to escape; otherwise, they would have had him executed.”

  • “They (the Germans, Ed.) had to leave. They sailed across the Morava River and left via Marchegg. Then, in 1947, he sent a letter to my mother. But she, not being very careful, had misplaced it. My grandma found it later. You should have seen the beating my mother got. In the letter, he wrote to her about the forest next to the Morava River. There is this turn; if you know it there. In that spot, the water was deep. It was deep enough for us to swim there during the summer. He was supposed to help us cross to the other side as he was from Austria. He promised to take care of my mother and the children. The letter was in German. But my grandma found it. She gave my mum a beating for trying to take away her grandchildren. Jesus! It was terrible.”

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Were it not for the Wehrmacht, I would not be alive today.

Police officer
Police officer
zdroj: pamätník

Karol Janoštiak was born in 1938, in Devínska Nová Ves. He grew up in the border area, in a house adjoining the railway signal box. Throughout the war, the family was hiding two Slovak military deserters. His uncle Karol was called up to join the rapid deployment division as an officer. Later, he was named commander and was killed in 1941, in Ukraine. Around 1942, a German officer Horst, who was originally from Austria, came to live with the family for two years. Following the liberation of the village, a Soviet Major Sergej, working as a doctor, stayed with the family for almost a year. The last person hiding with the Janoštiak family arrived in 1948. It was a student from Prague, planning a protest against Gottwald. When the barbed wire fences started to rise around the borders, the family helped the student to escape by crossing the Morava River. The student managed to emigrate to Australia. Karol Janoštiak trained to be an auto mechanic and worked in the Central Automobile Repair Services of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic´s Ministry of Interior. His first wife emigrated to the U.S. in 1969. In 1971, he remarried and had two kids.