“The first day, I can still recall myself and other friends with who I spent the past two years. My first shift was disastrous; I thought I wouldn’t have managed it there. We arrived to about a kilometer down from the pit and there was an 80-cm wide wall, which the miners hammered before. We were lying on our backs and we had to load the coal onto the conveyor belt. I thought to myself: ‘Gracious God, I won’t survive till the end of the shift.’ To be lying and loading, and those 80 centimeters… It was the first time and I guess also the last time when something shocked me so greatly. As I was lying there, loading coal with the big shovel on the belt, I thought I might never come out well.”
“Yet in 1952 Gottwald offered us, the unreliable ones, to Stalin, so that he could send us to gulags in Siberia. That would really have been a catastrophe. We were lucky that Stalin died suddenly and moreover, that after him Gottwald died even more unexpectedly.”
“When we came home, instead of relaxing, every day we had to attend training – as to be said – from sun to sun. The respected comrade lieutenant used to tell us: ‘It’s good for you not to have any time for thinking!’ Meaning, that partially they needed to push us down manually, but also psychologically.”
Vojtech Mikláš was born on October 20, 1928 in the village of Veľké Chyndice near Vráble. His parents Mária and Vincent were farmers. After 1938 his home village was annexed to Hungary and so Vojtech studied at grammar school in Budapest. He didn’t finish his studies because of front-line combats. After the war he attended grammar school in Nitra and wanted to become a priest. In 1950 he was labeled as politically unreliable person and was taken to Auxiliary Technical Battalions, where he spent almost three years. He was released in December 1953 on parole that he would serve one more year in his local military quarters. Later he managed to complete evening school with school leaving examination, but during the whole communist regime he had to work only as a manual worker. Currently he lives in Jelšovce near Nitra.
