Ing. First Lieutenant Boris Malák

"At that time it was Colonel Ressel, who also came from England, and was the commander of the artillery corps. On Mount Minčol, before Žilina it was still, so on the other side were ours, and on Minčol were the Germans. And when it was April, I think it was the twenty-second or something like that, it was Hitler's birthday, and they hung the flag there. Well, suddenly Colonel Ressel, we were there for about two or three days like that, he was watching, he had a tent covered with pine needles and so on. I was in charge of radio communications, and when the Colonel went there, I went with him, from the group of signalmen on the staff. All of a sudden the flag came up and Colonel Ressel was looking around. And he said, 'Are there any gunners here?' And there were about two or three guns. And there were several oxen pulling it up the hill, up the hill. And I think they were six-shooters, cannons. And he called one of the gunners and he said, 'If you shoot that down, you'll get a war cross.' Well, they set up the gun, so he aimed and aimed. And as he said that, I was scared. Because I knew that if the guy got it right, he'd want a war cross. And I was already running around the guys, 'Does anybody have a war cross? Guys, I'll sign it for you! You have to lend it to me! Because if he shoots it down, Ressel's gonna want a war cross on me!' So they lent it to me. And now I had it, the cross, with me, I was glad. So he aimed, aimed, shoot him. Nothing. Aim, aim, aim - and the flag's gone! Oh, that was glorious! And: 'Boris, do you have it?' I said, 'Got it.' So he patted me on the back and honoured the meter man. That was good!"

"Because we knew that our boys, the infantrymen, from the second battalion were preparing to go to the border. First. As a reconnaissance. And that second battalion, those scouts, those infantrymen, they were the first to cross the border and the first to plant the flag. That was the preparation. Well, that was glorious! But then again, when it was shooting, it was falling, we forgot about the glory and looked to get into the woods as soon as possible. Again, you don't know in such detail what it was like, but I know we went through the ditches, then onto the road, and we rushed up the road and did jumps and rushed up again until we got into the woods. And then again, some of the hills. There it was like, the Germans had taken the strip, we took it, well we, our soldiers took it, they advanced and there was another strip. And that was higher up. Well. And there they had already prepared some trenches too, because those [liberated] Slovaks said that they had to dig trenches there too, for the Germans. And so it happened that from three battalions they made one battalion. How were the losses. And that was already on the... not the one, still behind the 534. We were there for a long time. How many weeks, I won't tell you, but maybe it was a month, I don't remember exactly."