Vladimír Trvalec

"I [...] did not experience the arrival of the Soviet troops in Partizánske, I experienced it in the town of Topol´čany and there I was in fact a direct witness to the occupation of the barracks where my father once had served. But the Soviet troops did not arrive there, the Hungarians arrived there. Basically, you could say that that barracks, Tornická cesta, I think it's called, they basically just stopped a convoy there. I remember our soldiers there in the open windows, just looking at it, or I remember one sitting in the window with his legs out and so on. It might have been like he wanted to provoke, but there was nothing like that going on. I know that there was a negotiation between the command of the barracks and the command of the convoy that had arrived. And we as children at that time started [talking] to those soldiers, because at each car, in the convoy, as it was parked, they sent one [soldier] out at each car to guard it. And among us children, there could have been no more that ten of us, there was a girl, younger than us, and she could speak Hungarian. So we were trying, being more experienced, to ask the Hungarian soldier some questions, why and what and things like that, we were trying it. I remember that he had an anti-tank gun, I didn't know that it was an anti-tank gun then, I didn't find that out until three years later during my military service, it was an anti-tank gun. Among other things we asked a question whether he came to shoot children like us. They translated it for him and the nice Hungarian soldier started crying. And he was a farmer who, in short, there was probably some kind of mobilization in Hungary and he was dragged away from the field, from the plow, from the tractor. And he found himself [...] At first, he didn't know where he was."

"As I said, it happened there where there was a curve, at the bottom, somehow the partisans didn't see each other and the Germans and a unit of Slovak guardsmen were already heading there and they met at the curve. There the partisan patrol, what I remember from the older people, there was some three-man patrol, so they were going into the woods along the so-called Deep Path, and in that bend there was the Debnar family´s house. And it was in that house, immediately, of course, they probably assumed that the citizens of Ostrý Grúň were helping the partisans, so that's where the shooting was ordered. They gathered most of the inhabitants in the Debnar's house, and there they shot, I don't know the exact number, about sixty people, maybe more."