“The Germans looted, pillaged, burned, they didn’t care about anything. I remember they burned down at least fifty villages. They burned down everything in eastern Slovakia. Our women would go to the mill for flour, to the bakery, to bake bread, and they took it to us in the forest. When they milked a cow, it gave better milk. They brought us potatoes, halushky, they baked us pasties, such a delicacy! For the work they did for us partisans, they would deserve to be well off. They went through a lot for us. I can see it as if it was today. They didn’t eat and they brought the food to us in the forest.”
“Still a soldier, before that I was a partisan, and in ’46 I went into the Tatras against the Banderites. You know who Banderites are? [Sure I do.] There you go. Against Banderites. Then I worked as an accountant. I made it to, I think, corporal, or sergeant. I attended the NCO school in Košice. I made it to lance corporal, and I was a squad leader. My cap on the side, and off I went. We hated the cops, I didn’t greet them at all.”
“Everyone has a function there, and [so] someone would send information on the whereabouts of the Germans, how many of them are there, how they’re equipped, where we should deploy some mines or where we should blow a train up. We had that all prepared. When the train approached, you pressed your ear to the rails, and you could hear the train coming from the distance. We kept watch on the one side, and from the other we planted mines under the rails. When the Germans rode a train, they pushed two metal wagons ahead of themselves. So that the wagons would be damaged, not them.”
“I had a gun, just a normal gun, that’s it. A gun and bam, it fires five bullets. We also had light machine guns, nothing else. Then the Russians came, so we got drum-fed automatics, right? But to begin with we only had rifles. Do you know what a rifle is? [Well, uh, uh, I know. A weapon.] Right, a weapon. You had your weapon.”
“[Q: What kind of roads where there? Or where there any?] None at all, it was all mud. Are you crazy? People there went to church, they carried shoes in their hands and put them on in the church, not to be barefoot. So that everyone could see they had shoes. But normally they walked barefoot, even in winter. The women washed the laundry, there weren’t even washing machines, there was nothing. [Well, washboards.] Washboards. Yes. [And there weren’t any cars, just carts?] What, what, what? [There were no cars, just carts?] There never were. When a car drove by once in half a year, the children would run after it and throw stones. There were no cars.”
“Poverty, hunger, and nothing else. There was no washing powder. Our women did the washing. They gathered hemp and made cloth out of it. They reaped the hemp, combed it, wove it into cloth, and then sowed shirts, trousers, and so on out of it. It was a hard life.”
We were barefoot, starving, in rags, there was no bread, no salt, just poverty and lice biting us. That’s why I joined the army, where I had bread at least
Colonel (ret.) Michal Vasilko was born on 10 April 1924 in the village of Nechválova Polianka near Snina in what was then Czechoslovakia. His father was a charcoal burner, and he and his wife had their own farm. Michal attended eleven years of school and then learnt joinery. He took part in the Slovak National Uprising, and from 3 August 1944 he served as a messenger and informer in the Belov-Sergei partisan group under the command of Prokopyuk and Belov. He was injured in the right leg. On 21 April 1944 he joined the 1st Czechoslovak Army Corps in Sobrance, but until the end of the war he only underwent training. After the war he attended an NCO school in Košice and became a squad leader. In 1946 he was deployed against the Banderites in eastern Slovakia. In 1947 he left the army and decided to move to Prague to find work; he was employed as a manual labourer and then as a driver. In his retirement he lived at the Central Military Hospital in Prague, where he remained until his death. Michal Vasilko passed away on November, the 21st, 2013.
