Karol Marko

"At that boarding school they didn't let us - the first and second year - out when the uprising broke out. But the older ones were already jumping out from the back of the dormitory. And they went - the village next door, there's a bridge there - over the Nitra River. There they started giving out weapons. I was there to wittness it, but I didn't understand. I was fifteen years old. And so they were giving out these guns there. My kind of subjective opinion about it is that unfortunately among those friends of mine who lived in the dormitory, they were young people. Nineteen, twenty years old at the most. Twenty years old was the exception. We were taken there at fourteen or fifteen years. The ones who were handing out the guns, in my opinion, when they saw what kind of - excuse the expression - kids they were, who were not supposed to be there, they should have kicked their asses nicely to go home. Because they didn't have any basic military training and they didn't know how to use guns. But that's what happened."

"I arrived at the boarding school; at Bata they didn't say floor, they said "etage". So I got to my room on the second "etage", I still remember the number - 32. I wasn't even there properly, and already the tutor came and gave me a twenty crown fine for coming to the room in dirty shoes. But I had never seen slippers before in my life! For we, when we came home from school, when it was cold, we had to walk with our shoes on, Otherwise we were always walking barefoot to and from school. But there he gave me that fine. I was fourteen years and four months old then, I didn't know what it was then. But that twenty crowns was a lot of money for me, because then I don't know how much I had left."