Michal Vasilko

“The Germans looted, pillaged, burned, they didn’t care about anything. I remember they burned down at least fifty villages. They burned down everything in eastern Slovakia. Our women would go to the mill for flour, to the bakery, to bake bread, and they took it to us in the forest. When they milked a cow, it gave better milk. They brought us potatoes, halushky, they baked us pasties, such a delicacy! For the work they did for us partisans, they would deserve to be well off. They went through a lot for us. I can see it as if it was today. They didn’t eat and they brought the food to us in the forest.”

“Still a soldier, before that I was a partisan, and in ’46 I went into the Tatras against the Banderites. You know who Banderites are? [Sure I do.] There you go. Against Banderites. Then I worked as an accountant. I made it to, I think, corporal, or sergeant. I attended the NCO school in Košice. I made it to lance corporal, and I was a squad leader. My cap on the side, and off I went. We hated the cops, I didn’t greet them at all.”

“Everyone has a function there, and [so] someone would send information on the whereabouts of the Germans, how many of them are there, how they’re equipped, where we should deploy some mines or where we should blow a train up. We had that all prepared. When the train approached, you pressed your ear to the rails, and you could hear the train coming from the distance. We kept watch on the one side, and from the other we planted mines under the rails. When the Germans rode a train, they pushed two metal wagons ahead of themselves. So that the wagons would be damaged, not them.”

“I had a gun, just a normal gun, that’s it. A gun and bam, it fires five bullets. We also had light machine guns, nothing else. Then the Russians came, so we got drum-fed automatics, right? But to begin with we only had rifles. Do you know what a rifle is? [Well, uh, uh, I know. A weapon.] Right, a weapon. You had your weapon.”

“[Q: What kind of roads where there? Or where there any?] None at all, it was all mud. Are you crazy? People there went to church, they carried shoes in their hands and put them on in the church, not to be barefoot. So that everyone could see they had shoes. But normally they walked barefoot, even in winter. The women washed the laundry, there weren’t even washing machines, there was nothing. [Well, washboards.] Washboards. Yes. [And there weren’t any cars, just carts?] What, what, what? [There were no cars, just carts?] There never were. When a car drove by once in half a year, the children would run after it and throw stones. There were no cars.”

“Poverty, hunger, and nothing else. There was no washing powder. Our women did the washing. They gathered hemp and made cloth out of it. They reaped the hemp, combed it, wove it into cloth, and then sowed shirts, trousers, and so on out of it. It was a hard life.”