Across the Dyje River, he helped about forty people escape to the West.
Stáhnout obrázek
Ladislav Remeň was born on April 13, 1928 in Bratislava. His stepfather was a war invalid, his mother ran a shop selling fruit, vegetables and poultry, which she bought from peasants in southern Slovakia. In the interest of the trade, the family also owned two pairs of horses, which they used to move households or transport goods around Bratislava. Ladislav Remeň attended the town school until the age of thirteen, after which he had to work in a shop. After the establishment of the Slovak state, he witnessed the expulsion of Czechs from Bratislava, and later Jews fleeing the Nazis found refuge in their apartment. They helped several Jewish families before they were denounced and the apartment was raided by the guards. However, both his mother and Ladislav managed to escape to the mountains around the town of Zvolen, where his mother was from. In the Tribeč Mountains, Remeň helped his partisan uncles. He experienced the Slovak National Uprising, counter-attacks by the Germans, commissars sent from the Soviet Union and liberation by the Red Army. His stepfather was shot by the Germans on March 2, 1945 in Nové Mesto nad Váhom for his collaboration with the partisans just a week before the liberation. After the war, he and his mother returned to Bratislava, where they continued their trade. After February 1948, when the family lost its business, Ladislav distributed anti-communist leaflets around Bratislava, which were delivered by his mother. At that time he was offered a job with horses in the depopulated Czech border region and found himself in Cheb. After a trivial misdemeanour with his bicycle, he ended up in the police station for a few hours, where the police accidentally discovered the rest of the Bratislava leaflets. Remeň claimed he found the leaflets in a park. A year-long investigation followed, and he was eventually sentenced to one year for failing to report the anti-state leaflets. After his release, he returned to Bratislava in the autumn of 1949 and became a smuggler in Austria. He made six trips across the river Dyje and helped about forty people to escape to the West. In early 1950, however, Remeň and his companion were arrested by State Security in Želiezovce on the basis of a denunciation. In pre-trial detention, he was tortured by lack of sleep and had his fingers broken. After a few months, he was tried in Bratislava, and a lawyer was assigned to him on the day of his trial. The state prosecutor proposed the death penalty, and in the end Ladislav Remeň received 18 years, later his sentence was reduced to 13 years. He spent half a year in Leopoldov prison, where he worked in a furniture workshop. He was then taken to the Jáchymov region, from where he was sent to the Vojna camp in the Příbram region. Until his release in 1963, he mined uranium ore. His mother died while he was serving his sentence, which he learned only after his release. After a few months spent in Brno with his sister, he had to enlist for two years. After returning to civilian life, Ladislav Remeň got married and started working in the uranium mines in Dolní Rožínka, where he stayed until his retirement in 1990. He received an award of a participant of the anti-communist resistance.
