“I joined the army, so I was in the army, and, like, that I should join the paratroopers: ‘Not likely...,’ I said, ‘... I’ll just go work as a driver. I’ll get myself some driving papers, or what, but I’m not joining the paratroopers.’ I couldn’t be a pilot, I didn’t have town [upper primary] school to do that, so I said: ‘I can’t do that either.’ So then, always when we had warehouses on the airfield, so we pumped petrol into the planes. And what we had there were, ‘two-fifty-fives’ we called, those were bombers.”
“And then they just started, the boys that were shot [injured] and such, so we started organising a militia. That was a proper militia, committees and all. Guns, we had guns, we got all that, and we kept order, no stealing, there was stealing all over, even the civilians were stealing. So we kept some order, and we kept it on like that perhaps for a whole month.”
“They deployed us, but then the Germans had a lot of trenches there. They had the advantage. They sent our boys rushing forward seven times. And then they stopped, realised it was nonsense. To rush. Seventy a day is what we usually had, that was our truck, which carried the wounded away, seventy wounded a day. That was a lot. So then the boys said: ‘Why don’t you form ski platoons?’ So they made ski platoons and they set off round the back on skis. [The commanders] gave the order for them to go from this side. So those ones went from this side, those ones went from behind, and the Germans were surrounded. So they copped it proper, and they reaped their just reward, as they say.”
“We were surrounded, and I reckoned: ‘Now what should I do?’ So then I dressed up at some [local bloke’s]. He was a gamekeeper. Well, what did he give me, some plain old shoes, rubber ones with holes because he didn’t give me any good ones. And I put my stuff away, to get rid of the military stuff. Because if I had that with me, I’d be in trouble. Except I just took myself four grenades, wrapped them into those old rags I did, and now the gamekeeper asked me which way I was heading. I said: ‘I’m heading this way over the hill.’ Which way. Like, the Germans were [nearby]. And he was a Guardist as well [in the Hlinka Guard - ed.].”
“And then, how should I say it, there wasn’t any money, so they didn’t want to support us any more because the uprising started straight afterwards. And the eastern front army went. [He] said: ‘We can’t promise that much.’ So they chose certain [soldiers] that they found [suitable]. So they chose me too, because I had two big boxes of bullets and a small chunk of bread in my backpack.”
First Lieutenant (ret.) Alexandr Leško was born 19 August 1923 in the village of Krivany near Prešov in eastern Slovakia. His parents were farmers, and Alexandr was one of twelve siblings. He attended lower primary school and wanted to train as a mechanic. However, his father could not afford the tuition with regard to his other eleven siblings, and so Alexandr went to serve in the Slovak army - he was stationed in Spišská Nová Ves under Technical Wing No. 4. This was already on the eve of the Slovak National Uprising, and in August 1944 Alexandr joined the partisans together with other soldiers. They undertook mostly sabotage mission targeting German units, but they eventually found themselves surrounded. Alexandr managed to escape, but he did not join in any further fighting. He returned to his native village, and when eastern Slovakia was liberated he joined the 1st Czechoslovak Army Corps. In February 1945 he was assigned to the 4th Brigade, where he crewed an “assault vehicle” (a period term for armoured vehicles, esp. tanks), participating in the battle for Liptovský Mikuláš and other battles during the liberation of Czechoslovakia. After Germany capitulated on 9 May 1945 Alexandr was assigned to the Slovak-Hungarian border to help pacify local unrest. He was then demobilised. He moved to Svoboda nad Úpou, where he met his future wife, who came from an anti-Fascist German family. The witness worked in Svoboda nad Úpou as a cargo handler and later as a driver at a paperworks. Alexandr Leško passed away on October, the 7th, 2015.
