Ivan Pletan

“I come from Carpathian Ruthenia, during the era of the First Republic this was the easternmost tip of the Czechoslovak Republic. This is where I was born and where I lived till 1939 when I escaped to the Soviet Union. I was born on October 19th 1922 in the village of Bukovec, Volové district, in Carpathian Ruthenia. I attended the elementary in Bukovec, and then the so-called higher school. This type of school does not exist anymore, but it was something between a business academy, a teachers´ training institute, or another secondary school. The higher school, which you studied after you have completed your elementary education, lasted for four years. Then I was working at home, I was helping with agricultural work. My parents had two hectares of land, and we owned two cows and horses. I was helping my parents in our home till the time when I decided to emigrate. And why I left the country? In 1939, Carpathian Ruthenia became occupied by Hungarians, by the Horthy followers. After my school, I wanted to continue my studies at a business academy. But naturally I did not speak any Hungarian, and thus in 1939 I was not admitted to this business school, and thus the four of us decided to leave, and we fled the country on December 1st 1939.”

“However, I was not a party member. I have never been a member of any party, I was a non-party citizen. In Ostrovec there lived a very good friend of mine, whom I knew since the war, certain major Vursta. He called me, and he told me: ´Ivan, you got to join the Party, otherwise you cannot get anywhere.´ I said: ´Well, but I don’t think I want to.´ My father used to say: ´Look here, never join any party, leave the parties to party-members, who understand these things. If you don’t know what is going on, never rush into it, never.´ I kept resisting, it was already 1956. He says: ´You see, you also need to study, to move on to another position.´ So I eventually signed it, in 1956. Then, later, I was already working in a higher position, I was transferred to Budějovice, to the division, and I was the head of the financial department. I had a major’s rank. For this position, a diploma from a military university was required, together with a lieutenant colonel’s rank. Therefore, that was already in 1958, I called on to the division commander, and told him: ´I want to study the academy in Brno.´ - ´What’s the use of it for you?´ I said: ´It is required for this position. If I don’t comply, the academy will have me dismissed and you would not be happy about that, either.´ I eventually convinced him to agree with it. The admission process was in 1959, my application was sent to the ministry’s personal department, and the personal department turned it down, claiming that the age limit for admission was thirty-five and that I was too old. In 1959 I was thirty-seven. The division commander called me and told me: ´Ivan, look, your application was rejected.´ I replied: ´Rejected? No way, I will not leave it this way.´ - ´What will you do?´ - ´I request a one-day leave and I will go there and talk it over with them.´ He told me: ´You don’t need to take a day off, fill out a travel order, I am sending you there, and go there.´ So I went to Prague to the main personal department of the Ministry of Defence. I got to some general, I don’t remember his name anymore. He asked me what I wanted. ´I want to study and you did not permit me.´- ´What so you mean?´- ´Here it is.´ Well, but you are over thirty-five.´ I said: ´I think there are exceptions. When the people of my age were studying, I was shedding my blood for this republic. I was fighting.´ - ´That’s a different matter,´ he says. He called the head secretary, told him to rewrite the letter, writing instead that he approved it and was now making an exception. So he agreed with my acceptance to the military academy in Brno.”

“Our decision to flee to the Soviet Union had not been planned for a long time. I did not run away directly from home, but before I spent a month on a farm in Nižní Verecki for training. And some of my friends were also there. We simply worked on a farm. And the older guys who were there, his name of Katrňuk, he was already twenty-seven, I think. He was the main organizer, and he was confiding this to people he could trust. We became friends and he was telling us: ´We will flee the country, there, you will be able to study. You cannot study here, you don’t speak Hungarian, but there, you will possibly be able to study in the Ukrainian language.´ So we agreed on a certain day. In the evening after dinner, we had dinners there, there was a common room for eating, for all of us who were there for the one month of agricultural training. We ate our dinner, took a loaf of bread and went to the border. We did not prepare anything, we went without any preparation, only with the clothes we had on, we carried nothing else. And we walked to the border. The border was near. From Nižní Verecki it was about twenty-five kilometers. We set out in the evening, and in the morning we were already on the border. We knew the way, or he did, he led us. There were four of us, he plus three other boys like me. At that time I was seventeen. So we crossed the border and announced our arrival in a border post where the Soviet border patrol was. We reported there. They immediately searched us for weapons. If some of us had a watch, they took it, the same with knives and similar, they took everything. They made us go to Skolo, to Skolava village. That was a former Polish territory, but during the Polish-German war it was somehow divided, Hitler left the western Ukraine to Stalin. They escorted us to Skolava, interrogated us, and there was an internment camp there, so they imprisoned us in that camp. We spent about two and a half or three months there. December, January, at the end of January they put us in a train and by train transported us to a prison in Charkov. There we were investigated, whether we were not saboteurs or spies for the Hungarians, and so on. The investigation in the Charkov prison lasted till June 1940. In June it ended and a verdict was read, for me it was a penalty of three years of labour camp.”

“Our daily routine looked the following way: we would get up at six, between six and seven. Each of us would wash and clean himself as the conditions allowed. In those circumstances, we had no water, so I would put some snow into the bowl which I used for eating, heat it on the stove and thus obtain water. Before seven you had to be done with breakfast, at seven we had to assemble and set out to work. First, we would be felling pines, then digging, and then placing sleepers. The sleepers were made from the pines we lumbered, and then installed on the frozen ground. This way we were building the railroad. At first it was only temporary. This temporary track was used for light wagons and light engines, only these were riding on this provisional track. Only after that there was a permanent track built along the provisional one. We were receiving food in exchange for the work. Depending on how you met the daily norm, food was distributed. If you did not fulfill the set standard, you received 300 grams of bread per day, and in the morning a kypjatok, this was boiling water with a cube of sugar. Actually, it was not cube sugar, but a sugar loaf, each of us would get a crumb from the sugar loaf and drink a kypjatok tea with it. At noon they would bring soup on the worksite, and in the evening we would have soup again. If we met the norm, we received additional food. If we did not, we only had soup. And the soup was bad. They would boil fish, it was a broth from fish or horse meat, they were butchering horses which were not able to work anymore. So the food was terrible.”