“I saw Nikola Šuhaj once. I was a small boy... about seven or eight years old. I saw him crossing the street as the police was searching and he ran away from them. And I remember that people were helping him, telling him where to turn and so on. About twenty or fifty meters behind our house, somebody opened the gate for him to hide in. It was summer and people were growing potatoes and hemp so he hid in it. The policemen came back because they were afraid of him. He came to visit Eržika. And sooner that in a week, the police set his house and the house of Eržika’s parents on fire."
“I got to Dresden with a Russian convoy and wondered where to find a place to sleep. One of the soldiers told me: ‘Well,where? In the subway.’ Everything was destroyed. I saw many destroyed cities and I was looking at Dresden and said to myself: ‘No one can rebuild this, nobody will ever make that a city again.’ And you see what it looks like today. At that time it was just endless piles of rubble with a line cleared just for one car to pass and with side lanes for the other cars to get out of the way. It was broken people were starving.”
“And then they killed him because there was a reward for his head, dead or alive. They were his collaborators (that was later proven) so they got arrested but were soon released again. One of them worked on road construction, another one got some work at a farm somewhere near Chop and the other one... I don’t know. The one that worked at the construction site used to commute about seventy kilometers. Once there was a feast in the village and somebody set his house on fire. They said that someone from Nikola Šuhaj’s family did it.”
“I went to the subway and it was a very sad thing to see... hungry children and so on. So I took out some bread and gave little pieces to the children. They were crying with hunger. I kept one loaf for myself and gave two to people there. In the morning, a watch came to find out what is new. There were dead bodies. That wasn’t anything unusual.”
"The Jews first issued a call for fifty thousand, when it was damn fortune. They issued a reward saying he who kills him (Nikola Šuhaj), or who brings him to the policemen will receive fifty thousand crowns.The lad somehow found out and then the Jews were terrorized,from him alone. "
“Everybody said that he was a very good and kind person and that he was forced to rob and steal. He deserted the Austrian-Hungarian army from the front. He came home where he hid in the mountains and forests. Then under Czechoslovak rule,they blamed him even for more... and added to what he did to the Hungarians. So they also went after him. And his younger brother was rather short tempered. He killed some officers...”
“She had a small shop and one Ukrainian woman, who helped her occasionally with the shop, sent me to bring her money. I remember that it was around 150 Hungarian pengö. And when I came there, the shop was already closed and guarded by soldiers or policemen – I don’t remember. They didn’t want to let me in so I told them that I was bringing her money, a debt, and that I have to give it to her. They let me in and I talked to the lady and she asked me for help. But how could I have helped her? If it was sooner and she could have hidden somewhere. But she had about three or four children anyway...”
Ondrej Derbák was born in 1914 in Koločava in Subcarpathian Rus. He remembers Nikola Šuhaj, a bandit immortalized in writer Ivan Olbracht’s famous novels. Ondřej Derbák also knew Šuhaj’s family and remembers the story of his murderers.
As a child Ondřej was a good student and was sent to a four year study program at the state technical school for wood processing in Jasiňa. In 1935, he joined the basic military service at the 12th artillery regiment. After the service, he decided to join the frontier (financial) guards, where he served until the Hungarian occupation in 1939. Shortly after the arrival of the Red Army in November 1944, he joined the 1st Czechoslovak independent brigade. Due to his previous experience, he was placed into units guarding the Hungarian border. Until August 1945, he served in Petrovo near the border. After the war, he settled in Bohemia, first in Moldava in the Ore Mountains where he worked as a frontier guard. In 1948, he was dismissed for being “politically unreliable” because his brother and his father lived in the USA. He was transferred to the state finance office in Louny. From 1952 to 1974, he worked at the municipality in Louny as the director of the office for inner affairs. Since December 2005, Ondřej Derbák lived in an old pensioners’ home in Louny. Despite his age, he was still active in the local branch of the Union of Freedom Fighters. He passed away on July, 8th, 2012.
