Štefan Dudi

Šte­fan Dudi’s fam­i­ly lived near Sloven­ská Volová in a set­tle­ment below Pahorok hill. Mr. Dudi recalls how the par­ti­sans vis­it­ed them, how they made them­selves tea and cof­fee, and on their way out mined the bridge and blew it up. As a result the Roma from the set­tle­ment were sus­pect­ed of being par­ti­sans and the Ger­mans took them to Humen­né. They spent the night in the school there and the next day they were tak­en by train to the town of Strážske, where they spent the next day with the Red Cross. The group was divid­ed into men, and women with chil­dren, and because Šte­fan Dudi was eleven or twelve years old, he stayed with his moth­er. The next day the Ger­mans took them on foot through the vil­lage of Tovarné to Vra­nov [nad Topľou], from where they were tak­en by train to [the camp] near Dub­ni­ca [nad Váhom]. On the train, Mr. Dudi’s moth­er gave birth to his broth­er Emil, who sur­vived his stay in Dub­ni­ca despite being so young. After the birth, the Red Cross treat­ed her and her baby at the train stop in Prešov. Šte­fan Dudi men­tions his moth­er’s inten­tion to suf­fo­cate his new­born broth­er for fear of what would hap­pen to him in those conditions.

After arriv­ing at the camp, they all had their hair shaved so that it was impos­si­ble to tell who was male and who was female. They all had to go through what was called a steam room [a steam de-lous­ing sta­tion]. There was a short­age of food; each fam­i­ly had a quar­ter loaf of bread and one to two litres of cof­fee. After a week, they sep­a­rat­ed the fam­i­lies again, so the chil­dren were housed sep­a­rate­ly and were only allowed to spend an hour a day with their mothers.

Šte­fan Dudi spent four months in Dub­ni­ca. The peo­ple there were starv­ing, and were just skin and bones. In the morn­ing, the Ger­mans always came with a wag­on onto which the bod­ies of the dead were loaded and tak­en some­where. Šte­fan Dudi used to go with oth­er chil­dren to the rub­bish dump to look for pota­toes, which they then baked on top of a stove and shared with the family.

The Ger­mans then had almost five hun­dred peo­ple shot with­in two weeks. They were tak­en away in trucks under the pre­text of tak­ing them to Trenčín to the hos­pi­tal, but Mr. Dudi’s moth­er over­heard a con­ver­sa­tion between a Hlin­ka Guard and a Ger­man, which revealed that none of them would be com­ing back. The oth­ers did not want to believe her, but her words were con­firmed – no one came back. Instead of Trenčín, they were tak­en out­side Dub­ni­ca ​“to the Ško­da works”, where a bull­doz­er dug a pit into which the bod­ies fell when they were shot, and were then cov­ered with earth by the bulldozer.

About five thou­sand peo­ple were impris­oned in Dub­ni­ca; only about three thou­sand of them returned home after the war, the rest died or were mur­dered there. Šte­fan Dudi recalled that his sis­ter went blind from star­va­tion and his nephew, aged about three, died in the camp.