Jaroslav Václavek

“This was already after the war. I still went to school back then. Few boys got quite hard slaps on the street. They were wearing a cross with a red drop on the coat´s collar. Some communist or an officer stopped them there and spanked them for wearing such things. So yet here the situation was quite slanted.”

“I said: ‘Eto Žukov,’ and so on. They reached for their guns. They couldn´t imagine that a civilian could have a map, and yet, such an accurate map with all the villages and everything. For example, when they were captured, they would have faced a death penalty if they revealed a unit they belonged to, or the name of their commander, or such. And suddenly, I was telling them these information, which they probably haven´t heard before. They would have shot us like some espionage Nazi nest. Fortunately, there was one teacher from Siberia among us, their officer, who was a very intelligent man. He understood the whole situation, sent the soldiers out and they left. Then he told me to destroy the map.”

“Well, we had heard that for several times that they were going to liquidate us. Or that they shall have paved the streets with our skulls.”

“Let´s talk about the fall of 1950. I joined up and came to Komárno. That fortress doesn´t make a nice impression; it was built against the Turks. Well, I came to one of those rooms. The rooms were quite big with arched ceilings. The men, who were there asked me, where I was imprisoned before. I said I hadn´t been in any prison. But majority of them came from other prisons or from Jáchymov camps and so. I told them I was normally working at the Eastern Slovak Machine Works. However, they still wanted me to plead guilty. So yet, during the first 48 hours I realized it was not going to be good; that I happened to be at some penal institution.”

“The communist barrel was inhuman and merciless. In Košice there were supposed to be built residential blocs. It was a locality, where some gardens, houses and small villas were. One of those villas was built sometime in 1930s. Its owners were older people without children. At first they evicted them to the basement and established some kind of kindergarten or social facility in their house. So they lived in the basement. However, then the demolition came. One cubit meter cost about 50 halers, thus they received approximately 200 crowns for the whole house. Obviously, they didn´t have any relatives, any other way out of this awful situation, they didn´t have anything to live off. They were already over 70-year-olds. Both of them committed suicide. Unfortunately, there were probably plenty of such cases back in that era.”