Josef Weinfurt

"Karel and I were so action-oriented, physically fit, so we rolled up a newspaper and, like, it was a knife, so we did the knife fight, because it was part of the training at that time, how to eliminate the enemy, quietly, without a weapon, just with a knife, and so on, so we were always fooling around like that. There was a lot of bullying, but if you were very physically fit - and being physically fit in the army was a plus - the best thing to do was to find an old hand, fit man, challenge him to a fight, beat him, and you had peace. That was a tactic. Of course, there were those graduates, those Slovaks were a bit tougher, but I wasn't bullied there, neither was Karel."

"Those of us who didn't have it, and there were more of us that didn't go through the paratraining, so we did the whole steam training there. And because it was in the winter, well, we were jumping into the hardened sand and all the chases, and the first jump, of course I remember that, was from Ilka. They took us to Košice, and we got on a plane there, and from Košice we were thrown out over the airport in Prešov, and the plane came back because it couldn't land there, everything was frozen. So they threw us out and the plane came back. I remember that because of the weather I took off in the plane several times and we didn't land, we came back to the airport in Košice and they took us back to Prešov by bus. That was about forty kilometres, it wasn't far. But the first jumps were from Ilka, on the so-called hold. From Andula, from the AN2 plane, we jumped on the so-called tear. This means that the canopy from the parachute was tied in the plane, one jumped out and the canopy cover remained in the plane. The person's parachute opened immediately after the first few meters after leaving the plane. But when you jump from the Ilka, it's a much higher speed, it's a big airplane, it had to be tilted like that, when you jumped, and you jumped on the so-called jerk. That is, one jumped with the canopy packed, with the parachute, and the jerk was that it opened only the flap on the packed parachute and the flap released the so-called pull-out parachute. It was like a feather, a little parachute that basically fit in your hand, but as it opened it inflated with air, so that's how we jumped from Ilka and that was my first jumps in Slovakia."