Mgr. Milan Ševčík

“František Tobola lived in our house, he was a lad from the Beskydy Mountains; recently, I was looking at a map of Beskydy, and in the place called Visalaje there is a cottage which is even marked as ‘U Tobolů.’ I have not been there since that time, but the cottage is probably still there, and it is considered a landmark. And it was to the Tobola family that I used to go often, I was eight or nine years old. And my parents were sending me there and only after the war I learnt that… When I went there, dad would always take me to Paskov on his bike and help me get on a train there, and when I arrived to Bělá, Hedvika Tobolová, and the other one, I don’t remember her name, were already waiting for me there and then we would walk uphill to their house. It was only after the war that mom explained to me why she always dressed me in a kind of a navy blue sailor’s coat; children wore them at that time, dark blue woolen coats with navy buttons… I always wore this outfit when I went there. Only afterwards mom explained to me why it was so. She showed me how the coat’s underlining had been torn apart and sewn together again many times, and I did not know that there were messages for the partisans hidden there.”

“I was three years old and one day I woke up and a soldier was standing there, and then I found out that they were the field gendarmes and he had to be very tall, because he always had to bow his head when he passed through the door, and on top of that he had this rifle with a bayonet. Suddenly I could hear: ‘Guns, Guns,’ meaning the weapons. I woke up and I said: ‘I have a gun.’ He went there and I went with him to the room and I showed him my gun there. There had been a feast in Stará Bělá and my parents had bought me a toy cap gun there.”