Petra Mendrošová

“Yet before the front´s crossing, even before the Uprising began, prisoners of war were walking through our village. The Germans rushed them. I remember how they drove them into one yard, where was a huge dunghill. Even though they tried to drive us away, as children we saw those poor people, truly ragged, half naked, wearing clogs, being on the dunghill, which emitted at least a bit of warmth.”

“The secret ones were everywhere. I went to Ružomberok and saw they monitored where I was going.” (Interviewer: “Were they so transparent?”) “Yes, it was easy to notice. So I walked into one store. I parked the car in the parking lot and saw him following me. Well, I went on, bought some threads there and carried them. I looked at him to let him know I knew he was there. We had some secretly ordained sisters in Ružomberok as well.”

“In the evening the sister provincial came and in the morning we were already being occupied; it was on August 28. – 29. The militiamen came to the port with their guns and bayonets. They stood in each doorway and ordered us to pack quickly, because we were supposed to leave at 9:00 am. Then the sisters asked to postpone the departure time to 11:00 am, as it was impossible to pack everything in an hour. We didn´t know where we were going. We were very young; we were saying to each other, ‘why did we even have to pack if they were about to deprive us of everything anyway?’. We thought they would take us to Siberia, and we kind of expected it. But then the busses as well as trucks came. We boarded, but didn´t know the way. They drove us to Kláštor pod Znievom. It was a concentration convent there.”

“They wanted to send us away from Slovakia, as we were ‘personnel of a bad quality’. Thus they took us to a factory in Šumperk. Located next to this building was a former labor camp or a German concentration camp. It was in the field surrounded by wires. The buildings were similar to those in Auschwitz, long barracks.”