Tibor Molek

* 1930

  • “The first democratic election was in 1946. Then, we really started breathing as free people, because the Democratic Party won the election in Slovakia, though in the Czech part of the republic, there won the communists assimilated with the socialists and thus Gottwald came to power. We had already known all of it, we had experienced arrival of military troops of the so-called liberator, the Soviet Union, who were raping our mothers, plundering, and destroying Bratislava. If you could see it, I mean shops, destruction of all those properties and mainly rapes. It left scars on us and real disgust in our hearts even towards Russian language, which is actually very nice. It is Slavonic language, melodious one and very similar to Slovak language. It is like Slavonic version of a beautiful French song. However, we were suddenly so distant that we hated everything Russian. I have to emphasize that I mean only the communist side, because I know that an ordinary man living in the Soviet Union was responsible for nothing. Back then, everything was done with force, there were purges and people weren’t allowed to study languages such as English. Of course, English was forbidden and we yearned for such things. We used to share them, we read newspapers from the West, if we managed to get some and we became great opponents of communism.”

  • “The crossing was very dramatic. I established a spy cell for the French intelligence service, whose chief was former major Matúš. He established contacts with the Slovak, Canadian immigrants, who came to Bratislava and persuaded me to work for them. I actually did it with pleasure. I wanted to have the cell really small, you know, it consisted of me and four other members who didn’t know each other. If they caught one of the members and accused him of something, he wasn’t able to reveal the others. One of the members was the most skilful and really ideal, at least I considered him to be such person. His name was Nemček and I made him my deputy, because I had to leave Slovakia very quickly as I was dismissed from the university and subsequently I could have been sent to the Auxiliary Technical Battalion. Therefore we decided to flee abroad. We had certain contacts with people in Záhorská Nová Ves, back then it was Uhorská Nová Ves, and it was the border village near Devín, where the Morava River discharged into the Danube, so it was quite shallow. At least we assumed so. We had such information. However, being in this area was forbidden, so we got false permits. I took my fiancée Anka Moleková, later Šašková, and three other men, so we were five altogether. She had one big advantage, née Kutnerová, that she spoke German, I would even say that a bit better than I. It also was the reason why we thought that crossing the border would be easy for us, moreover, we expected somebody to wait for us on the other side of the river as it had been agreed. Nobody was there. As I mentioned that the course of events was dramatic, I have to say that one got drowned there, another was shot and only three of us managed to reach the Austrian territory. We couldn’t have been pursued there, until we reached the nearest village. We had some winter coats and a small case, so that we had the basic necessary things with us. As it was January, there was a real cold and the river was much deeper than we had assumed. And there was snow and ice floes and the like. Then, I was forced to knock on the window of a house belonging to some peasant and I asked him to let us in. I was armed as it was a very dangerous situation, he could have betrayed us and led us to the Russian department, at that time, it was still the Russian zone and Russians would have sent us back immediately. In brief, I asked him to help us. We were really fortunate, because he was willing to do so as he had already helped several other people. Therefore I can say that a lot of Austrian people living in border areas sympathized with refugees. Of course, taxi drivers in Vienna were paid some money per head, so it was dangerous and I was really feared when we got to Vienna and I got in the cab and told to the driver, ‘I have a gun and you have to drive us to the American consulate. If you take me somewhere else, you will face the consequences.”

  • “The German public was really outraged, they took our side, but they didn’t want us there as they wanted to avoid any dangerous situations and to prevent the German citizens from being injured and the like. Of course, we were touched and three of us, Antalič, Skukálek and Maruška, I can’t recall her surname [Puldová], were badly injured. Skukálek wasn’t able to work the way he had worked before. He was a graphic artist as well as a redactor. It also affected Antalič and Maruška, who even died a bit later. I don’t want to say that it was the result of that attack, but everything impacted on us and only many years later we were able to recognize all its harsh impacts and mainly diseases.”

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Our idealism and fight against communism was so intense that we were afraid of nothing

Young Tibor Molek
Young Tibor Molek

Tibor Molek was born in 1930 in Banská Bystrica as the only son of the local clerk. In the late 1930s the whole family moved to Senec and thence to Bratislava, where Tibor pursued his studies at the grammar school. Shortly after the communist takeover in Czechoslovakia in 1948 he started studying law at the university in Bratislava. The sharp practices of the regime as well as its ideology made him feel disgusted since its very beginning. His effort to fight against it led him to found an anti-communist cell for French intelligence service. However, his activities and attitudes couldn‘t escape the security‘s attention, and thus Tibor was dismissed from the university in the second year of his studies. In the middle of January he joined the group of five people, his future wife Anka was among them, and they attempted to sail across the Danube River; however, only three of them managed to reach Austrian bank. He and his girlfriend went through Vienna and Linz and managed to get to Munich, where he got a job in the Radio Free Europe. He worked in the Radio Free Europe until his voluntary notice after the fall of the Iron Curtain. He returns to Slovakia regularly and really gladly.