The First Days of the 1968 Soviet Occupation of Rožňava. Death of a Civilian and Shooting at the Kras Hotel

This paper presents different variants of two stories from Rožňava related to the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1968, based on the accounts of local and neighbourhood informants. The question was asked in what form the local memory preserved the stories of the two former incidents: 1. the memory of the fatal accident caused by a Soviet tank, 2. the shooting at the Kras Hotel by Soviet soldiers. 1. The scene of the fatal accident on the day of the invasion of Rožňava was the main road across the town, when some of the local young men blocked the path of the tanks entering the town. 1. In the confusion, a young man (father of a family) standing on the side of the road was pinned by a tank against the wall of the building behind him, and his life could not be saved. There are two main variants of this story and several sub-variants. One main variant is that the tank deliberately pushed the victim against the wall, while the other variant is that it was an accident, the young man was in the wrong place at the wrong time. (A small memorial was erected in memory of Štefan Ciberaj, who died in the accident.) 2. The shooting at the city’s popular Kras Hotel took place on the third day after the invasion. The Soviet soldiers directing traffic at the intersection thought they were under attack by civilians, so they started shooting in the direction of where they thought the attack was coming from, mostly in the direction of the Kras Hotel. Several people were injured in the shooting, but fortunately there were no fatalities. Two main variants of this case are also preserved in local memory (with separate sub-variants).  One main variant is that the soldiers who were posting heard the shots from a nearby cinema, as an Indian film was being shown, and they thought that someone was shooting at them. Another variant is that a drunken officer fired his gun at the Kras Hotel, and the soldiers thought they were being attacked from there. In the decades that have passed, there have been countless variants of both incidents in the common knowledge, but there are many who have not heard of either incident, or if they have, very little concrete information has reached them.