Mikuláš Tóth

* 1956

  • "Next to Devínská cesta, we had a border patrol called Iron on the island of Sihoť. It was also somewhat colder weather, and so the control belt froze a bit. When there were footprints, it was not possible to judge well whether it was an animal or someone had crossed. One evening, a signal was given in the left part, and both the border patrol and the alarm patrol intervened. They ran there and saw some traces on the KP (control belt), but they evaluated that it was probably an animal, because there were no obvious traces that it was a human footprint. So they came back. They wrote that it was not a person, but an animal, or a technical error. But they didn't notice that the staples were torn on one part. Somehow they missed it. And then the intruder passed theough, he stretched the wires and crossed the Danube. But the current was so strong that it carried him out to Petržalka. Petržalka had their first border patrol there at night. And he went ashore and thought he was already in Austria. So he went straight to the patrol that was in Petržalka. And they caught him. "

  • "After three months, we were deployed to individual border companies. I was assigned to the ninth company in the then border village of Devín. The emphasis has always been on the class enemy and the potential violator of state borders. They kept emphasizing this to us. But the significance of this was a little perverted, because they told us that the main enemy was abroad, that some agents, spies, would come to us from the capitalist countries and would harm our socialist establishment. It took us a long time to realize who we would protect the state border from and in what way. We thought that the pressure would come from abroad to the interior and that we would be facing abroad. And that there will be pressure from some soldiers, armies, or such, as I mentioned, agents and such. But the opposite was true. When we joined the border companies, the pressure was the opposite from the interior to the rest of the world, and not the other way around. We had our backs turned and faced inland. "

  • "As for the the service at the state border, it could not have been made easier in any way, because if someone were to ease it in some way, it would harm both himself and his colleagues, whom he practically had in the service. The border patrol also had a neighboring patrol on the left and right, and if one did something wrong at their post, the two neighboring patrols could pay for it. So it was impossible to not notice something in the observation zone that I was supposed to observe, because when I did not observe it and I let it go to the right or to the left, the one on the right or left caught it, or not. And then, in retrospect, it would be checked how he could have gotten into the second observation zone when he passed me, for example. I explained this kind of quickly, that it was not good to treat it in such a way as to make something easier in such a service, because there was then a punishment for the border guard, from a ban on outings, to three days in prison, to the prosecutor. So there was no way out of it. And what’s more, members of the counterintelligence were deployed there, and they watched us serve. From the ranks of our soldiers. I only learned this in civilian life, that they had agents from our ranks who signed a service with them, and they monitored us. They just spied on us. These were the correspondents of the internal counterintelligence from the Bratislava Brigade. "

  • Celé nahrávky
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    Bratislava, 06.02.2020

    (audio)
    délka: 02:02:57
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of 20th Century
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

The fact that they forced us to act against our fellow citizens was a perversion

Historical photography of the witness
Historical photography of the witness
zdroj: Súkromný archív pamätníka

Mikuláš Tóth was born on May 24, 1956 in Sečovce (Trebišov District, Košice Region). He had one older sister, Gabriela. Their mother, Helena, worked in a notary‘s office with a land register, father Mikuláš was a carpenter, later a manual laborer. After primary school in Sečovce, Mikuláš graduated from the Secondary Vocational School of Industrial Construction in Košice (1971 - 1975). After half a year in the national company Montostav Košice, he joined basic military service (1976 - 1978) as a border guard in the 9th Company in the border village of Devín serving in the 11th Bratislava Border Guard Brigade, PS Unit 59-47. After the war, he returned to Montostav Košice. In the years 1981 - 1983 he worked as a construction manager in the company Pozemné stavby Michalovce. From 1983 to 1990 he worked in tunnel kilns in Východoslovenské železiarny. Then until his retirement (2019) he would have a series of short-term jobs. In 1981, 1985 and 1989, he completed compulsory military exercises of twenty-eight days in Bratislava and Michalovce. Mikulas never married and has no children. In 2020 he lived in Sečovce.