Josef Heldes

"[Beckov] did not participate in the partisan war to any great extent. But in Selec, where my mother comes from, which is tucked away between the mountains, like a wedge beneath the Inovec Mountains, there were plenty of partisans. Well, as luck would have it, the Germans surrounded the whole of Selec, shooting at anyone who ran, killing or wounding them. And the men who were there, about 73 of them [56], were herded into the park in Beckov. Among them were my mother's sister's husband and son, the Šišovský family. And there was Kabát, my mother's brother, and his two sons. One of his sons had been wounded in the partisan war, he had some kind of prosthesis, something wrong with his hand. They interrogated them at the Cholar Hotel, beat them there, didn't give them anything to eat or drink. They kept them there for about two days in the park, no bed, no shelter, nothing. Whoever could or couldn't, gave them something or nothing, like some food, whatever they could. Then they were taken away and, of course, many of them did not return because they died in concentration camps. There were two partisans who were convicted, I don't know how, so they were taken away from Beckov Castle. They had to dig a pit, where they shot them both and buried them. After the war, they dug them up and buried them in the cemetery as a kind of act of reverence."

"Of course, some of them were also in the National Committee. Of course, Hlinka's Guard used to go there. As children, we used to march around them. It ended up with Hlinka's Guard expelling all Czechs. 'All Czechs out!' The reason? 'Czechs into the moss, moss into the Danube!' Because when you looked around, there were Czechs everywhere: the priest was Czech, the notary was Czech, all the police were Czech, the teachers were Czech. Wherever you looked, there were no Slovaks, only Czechs. And they stuck to their Czech language. In the end, there was so much pressure that the Czechs were forced out. They drove all the Czechs out of Beckov. Maybe three families remained, the neutral ones, who had been neutral before. The rest had to leave! They were kicked out, and that was it. In Slovakia, all over Slovakia, and that was that. 'We will govern ourselves.'"

"Some were wealthy, mainly the Wiener and the Kurz families. Some were merchants, others were dealers. They simply did what they could. I can also mention the expulsion of the Jews. When the Slovak State was established and the expulsion of the Jews began, Germans came to Beckov and the Jews had to prepare to leave. So they drove them away, deported them all, and out of 38 Jewish families, only seven people returned after the war. I remember very well another thing, which is that originally the Jews, especially the rich ones, Kurz and Wiener, tried to prevent the expulsion by converting to Catholicism, by being baptized into the Roman Catholic religion. But even that didn't help them, because they were still in danger of being taken away despite all that. And imagine what it must have been like for the Jews who were hiding in the monastery in Beckov, in the crypt underground, where they lived for what must have been a year and a half, two years."