Karol Marko

* 1929

  • "Imagine that when February came - it was called the victory of the working people - they replaced several managers of our factory, graduates of the Bata School, because they were not suitable, and put people in there who were not even experts, but had legitimacy. And what started? They started smoking, drinking, having coffee in the factory, and the staircases in the corridors - the repairmen had a little place where they had a workshop for a while - so they played cards there, and they even brought the women there. You know how it runs. So this has changed. And that didn't exist at Bata."

  • "At that boarding school they didn't let us - the first and second year - out when the uprising broke out. But the older ones were already jumping out from the back of the dormitory. And they went - the village next door, there's a bridge there - over the Nitra River. There they started giving out weapons. I was there to wittness it, but I didn't understand. I was fifteen years old. And so they were giving out these guns there. My kind of subjective opinion about it is that unfortunately among those friends of mine who lived in the dormitory, they were young people. Nineteen, twenty years old at the most. Twenty years old was the exception. We were taken there at fourteen or fifteen years. The ones who were handing out the guns, in my opinion, when they saw what kind of - excuse the expression - kids they were, who were not supposed to be there, they should have kicked their asses nicely to go home. Because they didn't have any basic military training and they didn't know how to use guns. But that's what happened."

  • "I arrived at the boarding school; at Bata they didn't say floor, they said "etage". So I got to my room on the second "etage", I still remember the number - 32. I wasn't even there properly, and already the tutor came and gave me a twenty crown fine for coming to the room in dirty shoes. But I had never seen slippers before in my life! For we, when we came home from school, when it was cold, we had to walk with our shoes on, Otherwise we were always walking barefoot to and from school. But there he gave me that fine. I was fourteen years and four months old then, I didn't know what it was then. But that twenty crowns was a lot of money for me, because then I don't know how much I had left."

  • Celé nahrávky
  • 1

    Partizánske, 11.08.2020

    (audio)
    délka: 01:38:42
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of the region - Central Moravia
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

When the uprising broke out, guns were handed out

Karol Marko in 1950s
Karol Marko in 1950s
zdroj: Archiv pamětníka

Karol Marko was born on 26 May 1929 in Dolni Lopasov in the Piešt‘any district. He was the fifth of nine siblings. His parents, Ľudovít and Amália, were peasants, farming six hectares of arable land, which they had to surrender after the February coup and join a cooperative. From the age of 11, Karol Marko grew up with his aunt in Veľké Šenkvice. After graduating from the local primary school, he entered the Bata boarding labour school in Batovany (today‘s Partizánske). The Slovak National Uprising caught up with him there. After 1948 he joined the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, where he remained until the Velvet Revolution. As a graduate of the labour school, he worked in Bat‘a‘s factories in Batovany - later the „August 29th Factory“ in Partizánske. He remained there until his retirement in 1989. During his work engagement he also worked as an official of the ROH factory club, thanks to which he visited a number of Eastern Bloc countries. At the time of the interview (2020) he lived in Partizánske.