Alojz Kováč

“They told us to get ready and hide everything in advance, because supposedly, if ‘Ivan’ (the Soviet soldiers, ed.) came, he would take it all away. We had grain that was necessary to sow the field with, and my eldest brother said: ‘Let’s sow it in, since when the Russians come, they will take it for their horses.’ They used to say they’d take it for ‘lošáky’ as for horses. So we went to sow. We came to a slope and my eldest brother warned us not to go further as we could have been seen from Skorušina, which was already a village occupied by Russians. He told us to rather go towards the stream, where we could hide in a hollow. That was a mistake. If we had stayed there, we would have been safe. If we had ploughed, they would’ve done nothing to us, but this way they thought we were carrying some ammunition along. We came nearer to the stream and they fired a katyusha rocket at us. We knew by then, that anytime a rocket whistled, we had to throw ourselves on the ground. No matter there was mud or what, throw on the ground and put head down, that’s what we were to do. We rode a wagon and when they began shooting, we heard rockets and jumped down from the wagon to lie down. And our horses lay down as well. They probably got scared of the noise, but they fell down like if one poisoned them. The mud covered us, but none of the rockets hit us.”

“They accompanied us to Ostrava. There we transferred and were escorted again as if being criminals, even though, some of the men were. They carried automatics and led us to military barracks in Radvanice. There they told us we were about to start mining; that our duty was to mine coal and behave accordingly.”