Viliam Maretta

“As the two partisans led him and held him under his arms, one of them told my father: 'Jožo, is that you?' The partisan remembered they served in a military together in Dolný Kubín. 'You won't sleep here in the basement, but upstairs, on the bed!' They lodged him as he said, but when some prominent partisan came and needed a bed, my father had to move to the basement anyway. There he waited until morning. One of the partisan leaders gave my father different questions about how he used to hand flower bouquets to Germans. And my father said: 'Yes, I had a bouquet, but I held my child in my arms and not flowers.' Such kinds of false accusations were against my father. My father was a bit flippant, he liked to talk directly. Many people got to hate him and tried to liquidate him. At last the interrogator asked: 'And do you have any enemies?' My father said: 'I don't know about any. I know I am quite plain-spoken, but I don't know about anyone having such a great hatred towards me.' 'But you don't have the same opinion as we do, do you?' The commander told him. And my father took out his rosary and said: 'This and our nation is what I believe in. I love the Slovak nation!”

“They began to take away priests. We had a good parish priest, so we defended him. They took him directly from school. Then someone came to tell us this news from Vyšný Kubín, what is about three kilometers from Dolný Kubín. They kidnapped him right from the school and in the meantime they searched his house. They took him to Vyšný Kubín, where the police station was. A man came to inform my father about what had happened and since my father was very active and ardent for justice, he quickly mobilized whole crowd of people. He even called up a former communist who owned a car and used to sell vegetables for living. Subsequently this man gathered so many people using his car, but unfortunately, he was also arrested, imprisoned and even sent to the labor camp.”