Vladimír Trvalec

* 1952

  • "Some people were relieved and it got easier for them, and as I can remember, when it happened after the Velvet Revolution that they were getting it [farms, fields, trans.] back, they weren't so happy, they didn´t rejoice. And I have the experience not only from those villages between the mountains, but also from Nitra region in the south, that some people were not happy either. Because I remember that during socialism, for example, a man from Nitra, a seventy-year-old man at that time, it could have been in the year 1980, was quite happy to get rid of the fields, because when it was necessary to work, to cultivate, to plough, he wouldn´t even come back home, he slept there, they only brought him food. And he was about seventy-five years old when I talked to him about it, and he was glad to be able to have a rest, because even at his age he would have had to work hard there."

  • "I [...] did not experience the arrival of the Soviet troops in Partizánske, I experienced it in the town of Topol´čany and there I was in fact a direct witness to the occupation of the barracks where my father once had served. But the Soviet troops did not arrive there, the Hungarians arrived there. Basically, you could say that that barracks, Tornická cesta, I think it's called, they basically just stopped a convoy there. I remember our soldiers there in the open windows, just looking at it, or I remember one sitting in the window with his legs out and so on. It might have been like he wanted to provoke, but there was nothing like that going on. I know that there was a negotiation between the command of the barracks and the command of the convoy that had arrived. And we as children at that time started [talking] to those soldiers, because at each car, in the convoy, as it was parked, they sent one [soldier] out at each car to guard it. And among us children, there could have been no more that ten of us, there was a girl, younger than us, and she could speak Hungarian. So we were trying, being more experienced, to ask the Hungarian soldier some questions, why and what and things like that, we were trying it. I remember that he had an anti-tank gun, I didn't know that it was an anti-tank gun then, I didn't find that out until three years later during my military service, it was an anti-tank gun. Among other things we asked a question whether he came to shoot children like us. They translated it for him and the nice Hungarian soldier started crying. And he was a farmer who, in short, there was probably some kind of mobilization in Hungary and he was dragged away from the field, from the plow, from the tractor. And he found himself [...] At first, he didn't know where he was."

  • "As I said, it happened there where there was a curve, at the bottom, somehow the partisans didn't see each other and the Germans and a unit of Slovak guardsmen were already heading there and they met at the curve. There the partisan patrol, what I remember from the older people, there was some three-man patrol, so they were going into the woods along the so-called Deep Path, and in that bend there was the Debnar family´s house. And it was in that house, immediately, of course, they probably assumed that the citizens of Ostrý Grúň were helping the partisans, so that's where the shooting was ordered. They gathered most of the inhabitants in the Debnar's house, and there they shot, I don't know the exact number, about sixty people, maybe more."

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    Partizánské, 12.08.2020

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    délka: 01:46:26
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of the 20th century
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My parents came from the villages in which the inhabitants were slaughtered

Vladimír Trvalec in 2020
Vladimír Trvalec in 2020
zdroj: Post Bellum recording 2020

Vladimír Trvalec was born on 11 December 1952 in the village of Fintice near Prešov, Slovakia. His parents had a turbulent life story behind them. His mother, Margita Trvalcová (née Barborová), was an eyewitness to the events of 21 January 1945, when the Nazis burned down the villages of Ostrý Grúň and Kl´ak and murdered many of their inhabitants. Vladimír‘s father Augustin first fought in the ranks of the Slovak State in Ukraine and then joined the partisans operating in the Vtáčník mountains during the Slovak National Uprising. Since people were helping these units, both villages were burned down. Vladimír grew up next to his older brother Cyril, who decided to emigrate to Canada in 1971. The regime took revenge on his younger brother. After finishing his apprenticeship as a shoemaker, Vladimír longed to study a secondary school by distance learning. He was not allowed to do so because he refused to give up keeping on correspondence with his brother Cyril during the years of normalization. During the invasion by Warsaw Pact troops in August 1968, Vladimír at the age of fifteen witnessed the arrival of Hungarian soldiers in Topolčany, where children, thanks to the fact that one of them could speak Hungarian, were talking to the occupiers and asked them why they were there. Vladimír Trvalec worked as a worker at the ZDA Partizánske [shoemaking] company until 1993. Then he was promoted, but during privatisation the rubber department where he worked at the time was dissolved. During the high unemployment rate times in Slovakia after 2000, Vladimír Trvalec was unemployed for three years. Together with his wife Věra they raised two daughters, Daniela and Ivana. Vladimír Trvalec was living in Partizánske, Slovakia in 2022.