Rastislav Krkoška

"I didn't shoot anyone in the war, God forbid I have to knock, I hope it's for wood. I saw a little bit, it wasn't too bad. The only time I was involved was when there was this one operation, quite a nasty one, where we actually had... We knew there were weapons hidden somewhere, and we were singled out. That's planned in advance, that kind of activity, and we were doing a run-up to it and it was going into the thick of it, and now of course you've got a bulletproof vest and you're in uniform, so luckily it worked out well, nothing happened. But we went in for real knowing that I could lose my life. So I did some amount of that activity for sure. I'm sure it takes a toll on you, being that kind of... I remember when we were coming back after a mission, when it was New Year's and some shooting started, I started going crazy like that, looking quickly, because it was common for there to be shooting. Even though it was after the war, somebody threw a grenade to somebody, those kind of vendettas between the people, that was just there after the war. Today it's not like that anymore, but just that year, six months, there was shooting on a daily basis."

"My grandfather basically, in 1944, just about, or in 1942, he joined the Slovak Fast Division that was once operating on the Axis side, and I'm sure you can look up what that means. It fought against the Soviet Union, there were countless books written on it, I even met a writer, two years younger than me, a Mr. Mičhiánik, who wrote three volumes straight. And the third and last volume, I got it, the others I have digitised, is about the unit where my grandfather was stationed, the 51st Infantry. So he was on horseback, hypomobile, and he was a scout. So that's where I actually found out in the archives where he was, where he was stationed, what his rank was, and his career progression in the Army. So I just want to say that they certainly didn't have it easy, because as a twenty-two-year-old kid, he got right into combat. It's too bad we didn't find out more, and my grandfather supposedly didn't even want to talk about it, from what I know from my parents, probably nobody did. Because they went through such an unreal hell that we can't even imagine today. I, for example, had the opportunity to be very close to that hell, because the war of '92 until the 1995, when it actually ended in the former Yugoslavia, was very similar."