Pater Jozef Regec

“I still believed (that I would survive), and I was telling this also to my friends. There were two brothers, a bit older than me, about thirty, and one of them was not able to abstain from eating and he died. There were many people who were crying in pain and dying because they had eaten meat from UNRRA. Only later it was discovered that they should not have been given meat, but only chocolate and things like that. I was thus stuffing myself only with chocolate, and it was not the kind of chocolate we have now, but it was very thick, I don’t know how they made it, but it was so thick that you could not just break away one piece, but we had to break it apart with a stone.”

“A friend of mine with whom I had been going to school had an elder brother, Smrek, and he was involved in the uprising as a commander, and he persuaded us to join the uprising. As the Germans were pushing towards Kežmarok and Poland, the partisans gathered strength and pushed them all the way toward Poprad up the mountains and to Žilina, but there they received German reinforcements and they scattered us. We thus had to leave everything as it was and escape to the mountains and forests above Banská Bystrica, which are called Old Mountains. A large camp was made there in the mountains. We were young and skilful and we were going to lay mines under brides and so on, but not by ourselves, but we were helping the older partisans who knew how to do it. But there was a traitor among us, and he disclosed our hiding place.”