Vladimír Janík (Dan)

“A problem was that nearby, very close to the place where we go and where we are accommodated in the Sunny Bay, there were Russian soldiers. They were watching their civilians there – these were people who had been on forced labour in Germany during the war and they returning home and these soldiers were watching them… The soldiers were causing us lot of trouble… One of them came there, for instance, he was a bit tipsy, and he exclaimed: ´. посмотри какая kультура!´ Look, what a culture! He had a submachine gun and when he came there and saw our tents, he told us: ´You’re such nice young men, I’ll shoot you all.´ (They called us komsomol men, because they had no idea what scouting was, it was entirely unknown to them, but they spoke about us as komsomol men and they didn’t like our brown shirts, it reminded them of Hitlerjugend…). Jumbo had a gun with him there – we were keeping night watches, because Germans were still hiding in the area after the war, and thus we had to keep night watches with guns, it was not easy... Eventually, a major problem occurred there when one of their officers got killed by a hand grenade… The way the Russians were fishing there was that they would throw a hand grenade into the river, the fish would get knocked by the blast and the soldiers would then catch them and cook them or bake them somewhere. It was the last day of our camp and an officer approached us, he had the grenades, and he asked us to carry him to the other side because he would like to fish there. There was no bridge, and we had this little raft, which we used for transporting stuff across the river, and so we took him... Incidentally, I was nearby and suddenly I heard a terribly loud explosion, he was simply slower in letting go of the grenade, he didn’t throw it in time, and the grenade exploded near his stomach and it literally tore him to pieces, it was a terrible sight. We, the boys, went quickly to the opposite bank, there we saw that he was dead, smashed by the grenade, and so we brought him back and the Russians then made a ceremonial burial for him, for having perished bravely in war.”