Miroslav Žbirka

“A man that was supposed to shadow us was a bus driver and I got into trouble with him. We were on a trip in Switzerland. The bus driver traded in the car spare parts, he used to go to scrapyards, take some interesting parts for small money, and so on. Back then, the weather was very bad, it was cold and rainy and I remained the last passenger in the bus. He had already planned to take some stuff to the bus, there was a lot of space to fill, and suddenly he shouted at me, ‘Why are you sitting here? Why didn’t you get off?’ I replied, ‘Why do you care? I don’t want to get off yet, so I don’t have to.’ Thus, he has been picking on me ever since and slandering me in the Engineering Works. He reported on me and the head of the trip to Switzerland told me, ‘You don’t even want to know, what all he wrote about you. I won’t even tell you.’”

“The one I have already mentioned to you, Šimon Žbirka, was friends with Clementis. At first, they went to France together, and as communists they were interned for some time, when they revealed who they were, of course… Then from France they continued to England and I don’t even know where all they went. However, some time later I asked him, for example, about getting to Spain as a soldier of interbrigade in 1936. He didn’t speak much about it, but he fought for the republic, for sure. Unfortunately, since all of this happened in the West, these men were perceived as enemies of the regime. He was an old fighter, so he was also in the Slovak committee of the Union of Anti-Fascist Fighters. But the communists didn’t see, he was on their side and they monitored him as a supporter of the West. Once he told me, he went for a walk along the Danube bank, ‘Even here a man shadowed me and I could recognize him! So, I waited, stepped towards him and said, - I know you have to shadow me, but you know what? Keep a bit longer distance from me, ok? - ’”