“There was a communist who used to help me, you know, people willing to help for money were simply everywhere...Geld regiert die Welt, money rules the world. I had a friend, doctor Ján Mikula. He was a chairman of the Slovak Tradesmen Association and it was a high office, you know, public one. It was a well-paid function and he also had a shop with goods such as coffee, chocolate, and other colonial goods. He had as much money as he wanted. We went to the borders with that communist party member as our guide. Mikula knew him as he was his classmate or some close friend. He paid him 300,000 crowns for crossing the borders with us. It meant that he really had that money, which I actually didn’t. Later, I paid it back to him when I started working for the Radio Free Europe. Later I learnt that he also had crossed the borders and immigrated to Canada, where he continued trading. We were only two and we even took the Soviet bus to Vienna. Well, it was normal; it was military bus for travelling. And we spoke Russian, so I was able to understand the soldiers there. And our guides advised us about the way we were supposed to behave, about what to do after arriving in Austria and they were really humane and polite. The hardest thing was to leave the border area. I decided to cross the border on New Year’s Eve as I assumed that communists guarding the borders would also celebrate and thus it would be easier to flee abroad. And it really helped us. We managed to get to Vienna, where there lived my wife’s former classmate, who had got married there and her name was then Groh. G R O H, Groh, it was a hardware store. They were selling various things for household and the like. This way we got to Vienna and I met Mr. Groh there, who found a room for me for one or two next days. In fact, we could stay in his apartment for one or two days. Then he said, ‘We can’t be here; we have to go to report you to the police.’ Then, they took and registered us at the police station and we were allowed to go. Everything was monitored then, the place we stayed and the like. We wanted to go to Salzburg, you know, the further from the Russian zone, the better. We really managed to get to Salzburg, though we had to sit on the opposite sides of the car to be able to see each other, but not to be together. Because there was a really strict control.”
“I had no teeth as they were all knocked out. I really lost all of them. Now I have dentures, both up and down.”
“It happened at the interrogations, didn’t it?”
“Definitely. You know, they tortured us really horribly. It was unbearable. I had had a dentist before, doctor Beseda, whose consulting room was in Bratislava in Avion residential district. It was near the hospital. Well, I used to go to the dentist, but then, when I had no teeth, he wasn’t able to help me.”
“When I was released from prison, the situation was such strange that I didn’t know where I was. I even didn’t know where my wife lived. She had to move as she was evicted from our flat. She was sent to stay somewhere else. I even wasn’t able to imagine Bratislava. You know, when I heard Lužianska Street, I didn’t know where it was. I had a huge problem, because they kicked me out of the door of the prison at the regional court and said, ‘Now, you can go! Go to find your family and take care.’ And I didn’t know where to go. Therefore I was walking somewhere in tears. It occurred to me that I knew Ján Mora. Ján Mora was a Member of Parliament for the Democratic Party, though in the past he sympathized with the communists. Well, I decided to go there, but he wasn’t at home, so his wife let me in. I was young and afraid of everything. You know, I was free but in somebody else’s house, so what I should have done? We were waiting there until her husband came in the evening and he was really surprised, because then people weren’t allowed to give interviews and information. I mean information on what had happened and the like. There were wiretaps everywhere. And people were afraid, you know, it was fear which suddenly crept into the public life of the Slovaks. People were even afraid of their close friends. At that time, personal denunciation was enough for being arrested.”
Imrich Kružliak was born on December 8, 1914 in Detva into a peasant’s family. He studied at the grammar school in Banská Bystrica, later in Kláštor pod Znievom and he finished his education at the Slovak University in Bratislava, where he studied Slavonic Studies, History, and Sociology. He started being active in the Slovak League in Bratislava in 1938. He also became involved in political structures of the so-called Slovak State. He became a head of the Úrad slovenskej tlače (Slovak Press Office) and worked as a chief of the Culture Department at the General Secretariat of the Hlinka’s Slovak People’s Party. He participated in the Slovak National Uprising in 1944 and worked in editorial board of the Bojovník and Národné noviny magazines. As an electoral manager for the Democratic Party he contributed to its victory over the communists in election taking place in May 1946. Later, up until autumn of 1947, he worked at the Ministry of the Slovak National Council for Nutrition and Purveyance. At the end of the same year he was arrested along with other Democratic Party representatives and imprisoned in Bratislava, where he was investigated for about a year. His bitter experiences with the communist regime made him think of the possibility to leave his homeland. He finally immigrated to Austria on New Year’s Eve of 1949. He established cooperation with Jozef Vicen and worked for the anti-communist White Legion movement, which broadcasted from Austria, as well as for the Voice of Amerika in Washington and BBC in London. He worked for the Radio Free Europe in Munich from the year 1951 to his retirement in 1980. At the same time he devoted himself to his own output as well as to translations, he was an editor in chief of the exile magazine called Horizont and actively participated in various activities of the Slovak World Congress. He returned to his homeland in 1989 and engaged in Slovak culture as well as in politics. After establishment of the separate Slovak Republic in 1993, Imrich worked as an outside consultant for the Slovak President Michal Kováč. He was awarded for his organizational and publication activities repeatedly not only in his homeland, but also abroad.
