"´Don´t shoot,´he shouted. Bang, bang, and that´s it. What else would I do? If he had been in my situation, he would have done the same thing!"
Jan Bugel was born August 23rd 1923 in Kalniště in Slovakia. In 1943 he complied with the draft and began compulsory military training in the Slovak army. In Zvolen he serves first as a messenger in his unit, then as a batman to the column commander, later to the German military supervisors of the division. In the summer of 1944 he is sent to Banská Bystrica, and ordered to transport horse carriages with military material to the mountains and the bunkers. This is where the outbreak of the Slovak National Uprising finds him. For four days he serves at the Tri Duby airport, then in the magazine of the rear service in the barracks in Zvolen, from which he distributes firearms and ammunition to civilians during Slovak mobilization. He takes part in the battle of Strečno, among others. During the dwindling uprising he attempts desertion, but is apprehended near Poprad, arrested by a German patrol and held in jail in Sabinov. He escapes and joins Slovak militia near Prešov. He joins the advancing Czechoslovak army on the eastern front, commanded by colonel Svoboda, he serves with the field police, ´clears´ trenches, apprehends escaping Germans. He becomes a commander of one part of an assembly camp for German soldiers. After the war he works in Prague in the Tatra factory, becomes a member of the Social Democratic party. In the 1960s he becomes a professional in the army, serves at the airport in Pardubice, where he is in charge of a mobilization depot.
