Josef Stanko

"Eventually, I had to replace my father at work myself. I was twelve or thirteen years old. My father had fallen ill with bone tuberculosis. When he got a prosthetic on his arm, he couldn't do much with it and so I, as a twelve-year-old, had to replace him. It was around harvest time, and so I gathered grain for my father. He would prepare the horses and the cart but then he handed them to me and I drove to the field to collect the grain and bring it to to threshing machine. This is how things were throughout harvest time." - "That must've been hard." - "Yes it was. As a twelve-year-old, I had to lift and load the sheaves, and to align them, that wasn't easy. Then to transport them to the threshing machine... I had to do my best to get it done. And not only that. After harvest, I had to plough the field, replacing my father. The worst part was loading the plough on a cart and transporting it towards the field where I had to unload it again, assemble it and plough with it. It weighed around forty kilos and I had a hard time just loading it."

"In practice, they used the farmhouse for their own accommodation. They had all of their weapons there, cooked their meals and all in all, settled in before withdrawing to the East." - "Was this the farmhouse where you used to live?" - "Yes, we used to live there." - "And what were the German soldiers like?" - "They were not excited because they probably already fought in France. And from France, they were relocated to Russia, so they marched through the main west-east road towards Michalovce, Svidník and the other villages there. Towards the border of the Soviet Union." - "And some of the German soldiers lived on your farmhouse?" - "Only to spend the nights there." - "Such as one or two nights?" - "Some two or three nights. Just the necessary time and then they moved away. Among them were soldiers who said that if they were about to fight Russia, they'd rather shoot themselves. This was their take on going towards Russia."