Blood flowed down the stream in our village. The Germans shot my father in the chest
Stáhnout obrázek
Helena Matrasová was born in Krajná Porúbka in Slovakia on 18 April 1935. Her father Jan and mother Paraskieva Derecs farmed a piece of land and had to work hard to support their four children. Helena was the second oldest. She remembers her childhood in Slovakia with both fondness and bitterness and admits she knows what hunger is. Krajná Porúbka had fewer than 200 inhabitants before World War II, yet life was never peaceful there. The small village in the eastern tip of Slovakia turned into a battlefield several times in the past, as it lies just a few kilometres from the Dukla Pass. Recalling World War II, the witness says, without exaggeration, that blood flowed down the stream in their stream. In 1944, she met General Ludvík Svoboda in person as he was visiting the villages around after the battle of the Dukla Pass. She recalls him as a quite handsome and kind man. Because of the great poverty in the east of Slovakia, she was tempted at age 15 to join Elite company in Varnsdorf. It focused on textiles production. She settled in the town in northern Bohemia, met her husband and raised three children with him. She was living in Varnsdorf at the time of the filming in 2025.
