Petr Bachrach

“I received a phone call from my unit. I got dressed and right away jumped into my car. I’ve never driven as fast as I did that day when I went to Golan Heights. We were attacked by about eight hundred tanks there. The only reason I made it there so fast is because it was Yom Kippur and that left the roads completely empty. There was only one unit at Golan Heights- the 188th brigade- which at the time was divided into two. One half of the regiment was rebuilt again and the other half was left as reservists. I was one of them. When I got there- as I said, there were about 800 tanks coming straight for us and all we had was about eighty tanks, or a tenth of their force. The fighting was very tough. Our commander was killed and almost all of the headquarters officers as well. Our tanks were also destroyed… but all of a sudden, the Syrians stopped. They believed that we had them in some kind of trap. Because of this delay, we had plenty of time to gather or reserve forces for help. We continued to fight for another two days, and had finally fought them off. I, personally, went as far as five kilometers out of Damascus.”

One day, my lecturer named Tochten, came to me and told me that they were looking for me. They took me straight to the train station in the town of Loptovsky Mikulas and put me on a train for Ruzomberok, where my distant family lived and I hid for a year. One day, on my way to Ruzomberok, I was caught. This was in the beginning of 1943. There weren’t any young people there anymore because all of them had been deported. So they included me in the transport with elderly people. They put me in the very last carriage. It used to be a cattle wagon and the floor in it was completely rotten. While I was there I noticed two particularly rotten planks. I started kicking them until a made a hole big enough for me to get through (I’m not very big). People were yelling at me, but I told them to “Leave me alone.” The train had already been on its way so I didn’t know where I was. I grabbed the axles. In the carriage above me were either SS officers or the guardsmen- I don’t remember anymore. The train was going slowly. Everything happened by coincidence. I told myself, “Either I manage to do that or I die. At least I won’t suffer at all.” I let go of the axles and tumbled a couple of times. I realized that nothing at happened to me even though I think they were firing.”

“They wanted to test me, so they sent me down to the town of Prievidza where a German unit was located. They wanted me to search there. I took my knapsack- I looked like a school boy. I knew German perfectly, but I also knew I had to hide it. There was a German soldier standing at the barracks gate. I started to talk to him as though I didn’t know German. He seemed glad that someone was talking to him. I asked him what was inside and he told me what kind of unit there was and such. With this information, I returned to the mountains. They knew I was telling the truth because they already know what was down there. I became a commander’s link and eventually became commander of my own group of ten people. By the end I had become commander of the whole squad.”

“We mainly had Czech and German weapons. However, we needed some ammunition. Our commander, Mr. Sečanský, remembered that they hid a large part of the munitions somewhere near the town of Prievidza during the Uprising. There were about eight of us who went to look for them with him. We found the hiding place, but it was already empty. There were tank prints on the ground. The Germans probably found it. We were then supposed to return to the mountains. Our commander asked us, “Are we going back without it?” to which we replied, “No way!” We then took places on the way between the village of Handlova and the town of Prievidza. There was a very steep hill there and we didn’t know what to expect. Then we heard some heavy noise… we saw two army cars: an army truck and an armored truck in the distance. We hid inside a ditch until they got close enough to us that we could fire at them. The cars stopped instantly because everyone was dead. We quickly jumped out and began to take everything we could: maps, guns, etc…”