“I am not going to talk about what training we had to undergo. When I was 16 years old, I really experienced and did things, I later realized, how I could even survive that? I always think about my sons when they were 16. I am not sure they could manage all those things, could bear the things I experienced as a newcomer in Russian army.”
“I did not say anybody I was going to leave the house. I said I was going to cemetery to visit my mom's grave. I went there, I dug out a handful of clay from my mom's grave, put it in a box and kept it with me all the time. If I had perished and been buried, that clay from my mother's grave would have been buried with me.”
“When I visited Auschwitz and saw all that rubble from the destroyed gas chambers, I became an avowed antifascist. Although the Germans had tried to destroy them all to cover up their crimes, it was not possible to destroy all the evidence. I can remember that in Auschwitz I happened to understand what fascism really meant, I happened to understand it because of people who had died there. Some of my Jewish friends from Michalovce had also died in Auschwitz.”
Daniel Kostsánszky was born on 1 February 1929 in Michalovce. He started attending school in his hometown, then his father decided to transfer him to Hungarian secondary grammar school in Bratislava. When he was 15 years old, he voluntarily joined Red Army. He took part in the fights of Vistula river, was wounded twice and while being wounded for the second time, he lost his right leg. After the WW2, he studied theology in Prague. In 1961 he started serving as an evangelical pastor in the village of Byster. He retired in 1999. Daniel Kostsánszky died on December 22, 2020
