„There were four of us, soldiers with a car, and we drove around the fields, where there had been war a lot of dead soldiers, so we were picking those weapons, we took them, we tried which could work o.k., in some cases we assembled three machine guns into one.“
„There in Mikuláš the front was stuck for two months, as I remember… Thre times, during the time I was in that unit, three times we drove the Germans out, and then again they pushed us out, three times, yes, it was within fourteen days, and that battle lasted for about two months there.“ „ How do you explain the fact that when you first took over the town, it wasn´t possible to defend it from those Germans? Why did the Germans succeeded in driving you away from the town, and even three times?“ „Well, sometimes they overnumbered us..or I don´t know…They had tanks there, and infantery and then artillery.“
„They found out somehow….perhaps when I was washing my hands, my hand was swollen, then they found, that my hand is totally frozen, swollen, blue, so they took me to the surgery, it was a soviet one, where they gave me such treatment, they pierced it here, of course, no anesthetics injection, and they pressed the blood out, the blood was blue, it wasn´t red.“
„ And what was the cause of this? Frost?“
„ Frost...“
„Well, when there was a bridge or a footbridge, and as they were withdrawing so they always destroyed it. Then, as we continued from Púchov on to Moravia, where the Váh river flows, it was in spring, March or April and Váh was pretty swollen and the Germans did stupid things to us, destroying everything which could be destroyed…“
„Well, there was such a mess, you know, people saw a soviet soldier and they saw .. I don´t know, perhaps a murder in him…So there was confusion, yes, and shortly perhaps in a month or two the mobilisation came. So they recruited… Either the Soviet army or the Czechoslovakian. It was all the same. They didn´t care where you go, they, the authorities,…. you went where you went, all the same…“
Ladislav Tušer was born on February 15. 1924 in a family of a Czech railway employee in Carpathian Ruthenia in the town of Rachov. He was trained to be a car repairman and worked in Berehov until the year 1944. By the end of October 1944 the Soviet army reached the area where he lived, and soon after that also Mr. Ladislav Tušer was called up by the recruitment commission in Medzilaborce and became a soldier. He was allotted to infantery of the First Czechoslovakian Military Brigade. First he finished an officer´s school in Humenné then he was transfered to Levoča, where he attended an armourer course. The soldiers had to be taught to fire various weapons, e.g. anti-tank guns. Except for severe frostbite on his left hand Mr. Ladislav Tušer didn´t suffer any major injuries during the liberation of Slovakia. His military mission ended in Prague. He and his unit stayed there for about a month and then an order came that they should return home. They were taken to Brno, then to Bratislava and finally to southern Slovakia - to the town of Šal´a nad Váhom. After the war, Mr. Tušer decided to settle down in Bohemia, in Teplice. His war companions found him a job there, in a service garage which later became a ČSAO garage. In the 1960 ´s he studied a technical secondary school for working adults. During a ROH (socialistic trade union) holiday he met his wife Hedvika, and they have a son named Lubomír. Died on November, the 14th, 2014.
