“It was during the First Czechoslovak Republic, dad went to work in a mine. (That’s how I looked when I was seven months). We lived closed to Patkali Lille and Salumes near the English Channel. It was seventy-nine years ago. In Orava three kilometres from the Polish border. When I was seven months old, I went with my mom to France to my father, who had gone there to work in a mine. In 1935 we returned to Bobrov after ten years in France. To the village where I was born. After our return I attended a school in Bobrov, and then a higher elementary in Námestov. Then I studied grammar school in Malacky and after graduation in 1944 I began working in the municipal office in Jablonka.”
“I was wounded, but it was only a flesh wound, but had it hit me one centimetre higher, I wouldn’t have survived. It happened in Vrútky and there were no doctors. There were only medical students, who completed two or three years of medical faculty. When I got hit in my head, I didn’t even notice. We walked through a valley in Vrútky. The Germans had a light machine-gun. There was a squad of us walking, and they killed three or four of us. I hid behind a rock and it only scratched me, I didn’t even know I was bleeding. A friend tells me: ´You got lot of blood there.´ I touched my hand and exclaimed: ´Christ Jesus!´ I was fully conscious, so I went to the first-aid station a medical student cut my hair in that place and put a bandage over it. He patted me and said it was all right. After the war it began to fester. I don’t know why our soldiers sent me to a Soviet military hospital in Prague.”
“Then we advanced to foxholes. I served with the machine-gunners. At night I was watching our front and the German front. The entrenchment was turned into foxholes. Trenches are just trenches and foxholes are outposts for individual soldiers who watch the front line. I took part in fighting for the Tatras, Liptovský Mikuláš, Ružomberok, and Žilina. Then we went through the Vlárský Pass, through Vsetín and Valašské Meziříčí, and we finished the war in Boskovice. That’s for the war.”
“While I was in prison, the military counterintelligence from Prague was conducting an investigation. I had some documents from the military academy in the attic. They looked at them, and when they came for the second time, my father, who was just mucking dung in the stable, told this colonel that if he came one more time, he would thrust the dung-fork right into his paunch. He knew that his son didn’t do anything. It affected the family. My sister, who is a nurse in Ružomberok, was also hassled by them.”
“With my colleague and friend we were lying in a foxhole. A shell fell down. We were lying there and a splinter hit his crotch. I was lying next to him. There was so much blood. We laid him in a tent section and carried him to Vrútky. He died. After the war he was buried in Trenčianské Teplice. I told his parents what had happened, they were eager to know, they knew that I had been on the front with him and I had experienced it. After the war his daddy arrived from Trenčianské Teplice to Bobrov. I was telling him how it all happened, how we got to the army, where we fought on the front, where his son got killed. He was their only son, a smart boy, he just graduated.”
Lieutenant colonel in retirement František Cvoliga was born March 25, 1925 in Bobrov in Slovakia. He spent the first 10 years of his life in France where his father worked as a miner. Two of his sisters were born in France. Then the family returned to Bobrov. He completed elementary and secondary school in Slovakia and then worked in the municipal office in Jablonka. In 1945, together with other two young men he decided to go meet the approaching Czechoslovak army. From Orava they eventually got to Dukla via the Polish High Tatras and Nowy Targ. He took part in fighting for the Tatras, Liptovský Mikuláš, Ružomberok and Žilina. He suffered a head injury, but the wound was not serious. In 1945-1947 he studied at military academy and graduated holding a lieutenant‘s rank. In 1949 he was briefly imprisoned for his political views and had to leave the army. He was then unable to find proper employment, and until his retirement in 1979 he worked as an insulation fitter. František Cvoliga died on November 15, 2020.
