Prosper Pajtinka

* 1926

  • "I went up, but in a different direction. I was at the upper end and my brother and I went from the upper end up to that mountain, Trtávka it was called. And when we went over 600 meters - there's such a straight line, some Gergel ran it there - and when we got there, it exploded. A big blow, as if it was hit by a grenade. And so we parted, we run away. Because it was close, we split up in Trtávka, and we came only home after dark. And then we found out about what had happened there. There were dead, and on the second or third day, disposal of corpses was announced. They were to be transported to Lupenice. It was snowing, fine snow had covered everything, so they took horses, sleighs and transported the torn corpses tied together to the cemetery. I saw those ragged, black, burned bodies...."

  • "I am the second time in the world. Because as they came there as the cottage stands, the parents, I did not raise my hands when they shouted in German. And that corporal, as a corporal, in Slovak, pounded this on my chest with a colt. But he didn't start. So I'm alive. To this day, I say he was a Christian. Even though he was the commander of the platoon that crashed into the hometown. Because the others have already turned the duvets where we slept with bayonets on their rifles. They poked under the bed to see if there wasn't a partisan."

  • "The Germans arrived, and they collected men from the village in front of the municipal office, there was no bridge, they went through and there was a building called "zidovna" (building in the Jewish quarter). A car with a roof arrived, men in German uniforms jumped out of it, we sprayed that building with an old syringe- there was a rocker, and two men had to pull it- two on one side, two on the other side. And they jumped out and let those men into this building. Only a part of it was burning, but they locked them in it. The men were wearing leaden gloves with such warts on the upper side, I saw it, I had good eyesight. And then the next day ... the building burned down, they locked those people in a room there and burned them alive. On the second or third day, dogs pulled out the remains from the collapsed building. The legs burned, heads burned, only bodies dressed in closed, or their tops, were preserved. Some Holoda, who was drummer and watchman, he tossed those remains with a pitchfork to sacks and they were buried on the cemetery."

  • Full recordings
  • 1

    Krásna Ves, Slovensko, 13.11.2019

    (audio)
    duration: 33:00
    media recorded in project Stories of the 20th century
  • 2

    Krásna Ves, Slovensko, 14.01.2020

    (audio)
    duration: 30:47
    media recorded in project Stories of the 20th century
Full recordings are available only for logged users.

To help is a duty

Prosper Pajtinka was born on November 25, 1926, in Šípkov as the second of 4 children. During World War II, he helped the partisan movement and witnessed tragic events in the village of Šípkov, where the Germans murdered 23 inhabitants. After the war he left to the Czech Republic, graduating from a construction school in Prague. In the 1950s, he worked as a master in Jáchymov and after 1962 for the “Odersko-Labska plavba” in Ústí nad Labem. He married to Morava, where he lived until 2014. He has two sons, both of whom are engineers.