European Resistance Archive/European Resistance Archive (ERA)

When I got out of that building, I saw a bicycle right out front. It was a German bicycle.

Maybe someone had left it there, maybe it even belonged to someone in that very building, I don’t know.

I saw it and I stole it, truly. It doesn’t matter; it was German. So I steal this bicycle and I start riding.

It’s a little less than 50 kilometers from Celje to here, but I just disregarded that extra zero digit and I said it was only five.

That’s the way I was.

I got there, to where my mother lived on the Savinja side.

I get to the left bank of the Savinja River and I see that the house is still standing up on the hill.

Battles in Yugoslavia

So we trained there.

Initially I was in the company for ties, and then I was a radiotelegraph.

It was in September or October of 1943 that we left. We went to the front.

We didn’t go to the frontline, but we were right behind it.

As the Soviet units marched on towards Germany,

we cleaned up behind as the German units got dispersed in the forests and we had to clean them up.

We crossed Romania, the Carpathian Mountains, and mostly we kept moving at night.

To get enough sleep at night, the entire company would gather together

and a rope would be tied to the cart and horse and then we each tied that rope around our waists,

so we walked and slept. You would sleep while walking.

If anybody in front of you fell down there would immediately be ten in a pile. That’s how we crossed the Carpathians.

Then we came to Turnseverin. That was the Romanian – Yugoslavian border at the time.