“As far as the Slovak army is concerned, they were all Hlinka adherents, who supported the pro-German president Tiso. It was terrible. There was hardly anything you could do. When somebody tried to do something, they simply took him away, arrested him, or even shot him.”
A description of the cruelty of the German prison warders towards the prisoners
“Once when we went to work and then from work again one elderly person couldn’t go on anymore and was lagging behind. They simply kicked him down into one of the deep shafts! That was it! Short process! And they made me pay for seeing this. They put me in a wooden box for a whole day without any food or drink. Just for watching their gruesome act!”
- born on May 29, 1923, in western Slovakia in the city of Holíč
- attended the Military school of aviation in Bánská Bystrice in 1943 where he was trained as an anti-aircraft machine-gunner
- joined the Slovak army after his military training
- joined the rebels after the outbreak of the Slovak national uprising
- suffered a head injury in one of the operations of the rebels but still saved his fellow fighter’s life
- was arrested by the German army after the suppression of the rebellion, subsequently transferred to the detention camp Ervěnice in the Sudetenland
- here he worked till the end of the war in the coal mines
- after the war he worked for the railways
- afterwards and up until his retirement he worked for Svit Zlín