Leo Eliáš

“There at Sandrika we got into a direct confrontation with the enemy horde. They were better trained than we were, but you could see that they had had their fill of it too and that they didn’t want to kill us, but they lobbed one frag grenade at us. That blew up into lots of little bits and it was over. I got a lot of them into my head because I didn’t have a helmet, we rebels didn’t have helmets. There was blood everywhere from it. The uprising hadn’t been put down yet. An ambulance came from Banská Bystrica, I was among the ones it took to the main military hospital. There they already saw that things were coming to an end. The commander there was a really responsible and honest chap and he said: ‘Boys, those of you who are from near by, go home, and you who’re from far off, come over there...’ There were twelve of us from far away, maybe fourteen. Then what happened - the commander, or headquarters, secured a transport for us to Sliač, and there I got a place on a military plane of the Soviet Union, as it was at the time, the Red Army, which had been delivering some equipment to the rebels. They took me to Lviv.”

“Back then I was in the right place at the right time. I was in the vicinity of Banská Bystrica, where the uprising began, at the time I was sent to work there with other people. We were taken to the city by a partisan leader who then became a high-ranking officer. He took us to Banská Bystrica to show us the uprising. There was great enthusiasm, lots of singing, poems were recited - Hoj, mor ho, mor ho! Detvo mojho rodu [Hey, kill him, kill him! Youth of my blood] by Samo Chalupka... And then he took us to Zvolen. There they dressed us in military clothing and gave us five one repeater rifles, and we became soldiers of the 1st Czechoslovak Army in Slovakia.”

“Well, and there (in the hospital in Lviv) I recovered quickly and I was ready in a month. So I got a travel order, and if it’s of any interest of importance, a small cooking pot, tea, and dried rations. And at every station they had boiling water, so I could make myself tea along the way. I travelled through Rzeszów and Przemyśl, those were cities, to Krosno - the travel order was for Krosno. It was in such territory that I could ask where to go next, I got there very quickly and easily. Well, and they had an enlisting there, it wasn’t just me, there were volunteers from all over gathering to give the Germans a seeing-to.”