"I tried the worst... he was a machine gunner and then I also helped him, I carried the bullets. And then he sat, they killed him and I really... They wounded him, he got a bullet in the head and he was dead immediatelly."
"So for the first time I joined the Liptovský Mikuláš, so there were about one hundred and twenty of us in the company. And there they put us right in the first line. So we attacked, I remember that we attacked first... we succeeded. Then we attacked again for the second time, we succeeded, for the third time we attacked and we didn't succeed, we had to retreat, it was at Bobrovec, but we were again ordered that it was not possible, that we had to move forward again." So then we had to obey, so we broke through. And then the Germans retreated, that was the end of March."
"And they came as they came, the Germans as they came to our village, so they took it all and drove away the people. But I didn't, I hid in the woods, there were about twenty of us. There we were in the woods for seven weeks waiting for the Germans to leave, and then we returned to the village. And when we returned to the village, we were there for about four days, and then I enlisted in the army."
"There were guerrillas in our village. The worst was when the Germans came for control and the guerrillas started firing at them. So, of course , they left and then came back with an armored car, about a hundred of them came to our village. Because they wanted a chairman and he hid himself, so they set fire to the village. They burned about five or six houses and left again."
Štefan Malaťák was born on November 1, 1926 in the village of Vyšná Oľka in eastern Slovakia. Shortly after his birth, they were abandoned by their father, who left the poor region for Canada for better earnings. During World War II, the witness worked at home on the farm. During the Slovak National Uprising, he witnessed fighting between guerrillas and German troops, who burned down several houses in the village in September 1944. At the end of the same year he enlisted in the 1st MS. Army Corps and underwent a month of army training in Snina. He was deployed to the first battle line for Liptovský Mikuláš. He took part in the liberation of Czechoslovakia and at the end of the war he found himself in Kutná Hora. After the war, he found a job in Bohemia and also his wife. They got married in 1951. They settled in Jenčice in the Litoměřice region and both worked for the state farm in Lovosice. He died on September 26, 2010 and was buried in Třebenice.
