"Before the border there was the Polish village of Zyndranowa. I was starting a car there, the handle snapped and I broke my arm. I broke it here on my wrist. So then I drove with my left hand. We had a hundred rounds of ammunition on that car, two operators and two mortars. Then I could [move] the arm a little bit."
"I was in the army and then we moved from Rovno to Boratín. That was next to Luck. And there we were at Torčín for live firing. At the front already. I was working as a liaison, I was in the SV with the observation post. I was in civilian clothes, machine gun around my neck, and it was only on the first of May that [the only] two of us in the whole unit got uniforms. Only two of us got a uniform. Then [we went] from that Boratín to Kiverec."
"[We reached] Krosno, Machnówka, Wroclaw, and there I was already driving. I had a Russian GAZ vehicle. In Machnówka I got hit under the front of the car and the GAZ broke down. I was hidden between the rear wheels as the shots were flying [,to avoid them]. My friend was behind me, he had a Studebaker, and if he had stayed in the gully as he was lying there [,he would have survived], but he wanted to get out of the gully into the house and fell. The car stayed there and I stayed there. Our mortar left. There was a bad wheel on that car [Studebaker]."
Miroslav Bernat was born on 15 February 1924 in the village of Teremno near Luck in Volhynia in the then interwar Poland. He lived through the Soviet (1939-1941) and Nazi (1941-1944) occupations in Volhynia and during the Soviet regime he graduated from a municipal school and trained as a mechanic. Afterwards he worked for the German organization Todt and for the Stickel company. On 23 March 1944 he joined the forming 1st Czechoslovak Army Corps and had his first combat experience in Torčín near Luck, where he served as a liaison. Subsequently, he was assigned as a driver to a mortar company of the 1st Brigade and completed training in Bessarabia. His first combat deployment in the 1st Brigade was during the encirclement in Machnówka. At Zyndranowa he accidentally injured his wrist, which complicated his service as a driver for some time. He then went through the Carpatho-Dukla operation and other liberation battles on the territory of Czechoslovakia. At Okoličná he contracted bilateral pneumonia. He underwent treatment in the hospital in Poprad and after healing was sent to a replacement regiment in Košice, from where he subsequently went to his native Teremno. Two years later, on February 12, 1947, he arrived in Czechoslovakia as part of a re-emigration action and settled in Libočany near Žatec in his original German house. In 1949, he moved to Volevčice near Most, where he worked at a state farm and then at the power plant in Počerady. At the time of recording (2020) he was living in the village of Volevčice u Most. Miroslav Bernat died on 6 August 2024 at the age of 100.
Witness´s friends and comrades in arms from Teremno, Žatec 1945, on the bottom right is his cousin and the man standing second from the left is his wife's brother
Witness´s friends and comrades in arms from Teremno, Žatec 1945, on the bottom right is his cousin and the man standing second from the left is his wife's brother
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