Arpád Tarnóczy

“When I was in Ďáblice, in Pankrác prison I had commanded the transferring crew for about six weeks. The transferring crew meant that we carried corpses wrapped in bags from the State Security offices and also from the place of execution to Ďáblice cemetery. We put some sand, lime and corpses into the ground beside the wall. Bag, sand, lime, corpses, we were forced to put three bodies into one hole. There I promised myself to bring everything what used to happen there into the light. I managed it in 1996, when I had been an MP for three years and when together with my friends I proposed a bill about amorality and unlawfulness of the communist regime. Act No. 125 from the year 1996 was approved, though just three votes decided it. This act denounced the communist era as an amoral and unlawful period. It consisted of many clauses, though when being debated, my original bill was curtailed a lot. In spite of it, I was satisfied that in preamble all of it was compared to a criminal organization, so I could say that passing that law was worth the effort. Well, three votes decided and it made me weep with joy.”

“I think I was happy to be raised in accordance with religious principles. I believed in God. Maybe living in the Salesian hall of residence in Šaštín helped me as well. However, we truly learned to pray yet in prison. To clear it up, we learned to converse with God because, you know, it was dangerous to express your attitudes openly even in the prison. There were those who, for example, got fifty grams of bread or ten decagrams of jam more than others got in their allocations. In Jáchymov we went to the small window and according to quotas we fulfilled that day we got sauce, for instance. I would like to say that human life has its meaning only when people believe in something and do anything to achieve it. I was the happiest man when I managed to make somebody else happy or at least when I helped somebody to do that. I understood that it was the biggest joy and happiness, nothing could compare to it. I would be glad, if the next generation could believe in something what leads to welfare, love, truth, and honour. It is really worth it. Well, my life is the best evidence.”

“In the year 1944, when I was just a schoolboy, some predictor cropped up that we had acquaintances in the labour camp, actually in a concentration camp for Jews. I didn’t meet them before but somebody had to take a backpack and bring them some clothes, travel tickets and papers issued by the notary, I think his name was Mr. Polakovič, who gave those papers to me. So I pretended to be Winnetou and took it as my homework to go to the camp “number two”. I got to the barrack number four and even into those people’s room. I appeared there, nine-year-old boy with backpack in his hands, and I pronounced those two names that I had repeated again and again during my way because they were really difficult German names. They went out with me and without any preparations we ran together across the field. It was about six or seven kilometres away. At night we went to the railway station in Zemianske Kostoľany and our friends, dressed in their civilian clothes, got on the train and I knew their escape had turned out well, because later we got a telegram from Zurich: ‘We have got a child! Our baby is healthy.’”

“After dissolving the Salesian Institute they unified the grammar school and other secondary schools, actually former municipal schools, so I came back to Nováky. It was just for a while, because in 1949 I was arrested again. For the first time I was arrested in 1946, before elections, because I had distributed posters entitled "Death to communism." But it wasn’t a reason for my arrest. In this case the policemen just battered me at some committee residence and sent me home. Of course they had to write it somewhere because later it appeared in my file, even at the Nation’s Memory Institute. Those were very hard times. When I was at secondary school, in 1949 on Christmas Day they came and arrested me. I was charged with anti-state activities because we had a group and let’s say I was its leader for almost one year. Our group had four (five) members, boys from Nováky: Martin Hagara, Vlado Rajter, Anton Štrnga, me and my older brother Ladislav. We drew up the programme, certainly, it was a kind of child adventure for us, and so we didn’t find it dangerous. Although according to the accusation, we had prepared the dispatch of communist officials, we wanted to achieve coup d'état and depose people’s government - the matters usually connected to all the accusations in that era. To clarify it, I wasn’t fourteen years old when all these events happened. In 1949 I was arrested. I was brought to trial in February, though my fourteenth birthday was yet in April. I got just half a year what was a very mild punishment as I was charged with the clauses like high treason and banding together against the state, preparing armed resistance, and other clauses for which people usually got the gibbet as we used to call it in quod.”