Corporal (ret.) Josef Kučera

“When the Soviets returned to Volhynia everybody automatically enrolled in the Czechoslovak army. It was already pre-arranged by the Blaník organization. As most people signed up for the army, the others went as well. For instance, there was a friend in our village who only had one eye. He poked out his eye when he was a kid. However, nobody would tell that he’s got a glass eyeball. When we went to the army and the doctor found it out he started to cry and said that he won’t stay at home when everybody’s going. So the doctor asked him: “what is your profession?” And he replied: “I’m a car mechanic”. But he’d never done it. So they took him and he worked hard and became the chief mechanic in the unit. So happy was he about being allowed to join the army.”

“They were deported to Siberia, I saw it. It was the best and the brightest, for example, a certain Anička Maršová. Her mother died during her birth and her father two years later. She was breastfed by my grandmother. When her father died her uncles got his lands and fields which were some 100 hectares. They sent her off to study. She was about to get married when the Soviets came and deported her to Siberia as a “kulak” (a wealthy landlord or farmer). She didn’t even know where exactly the fields were located. In Siberia she ended badly, she didn’t return to Czechoslovakia anymore.”

“You know, I remember not only the coming of the Germans but also the coming of the Russians. The Poles were overly nicely dressed; they had to have their shoes polished every day. And the Soviet soldiers wore long and dirty army coats, they were unwashed and unshaved and scared of the communist regime… So it was a huge jump from the elegantly dressed Poles to these smudgy Soviet soldiers. I mean it wasn’t their fault but it was a tremendous contrast. And later on, when the Germans invaded the Soviet Union, the contrast was terrible again, because the Germans murdered along the way, literally murdered. When they, for example, captured a whole brigade of the Soviet army, they drove them remorselessly on and on and simply shot the ones who couldn’t go on anymore. They didn’t give the prisoners any food. So this led to a strong resentment towards the Germans in Volhynia. Even those who previously disagreed with the Soviet occupation and might have been pro-German, now turned against the Germans and went into the forests to found the first guerilla groups.”

“The Germans murdered while the Russians didn’t know how to manage an economy. Everybody who owned something nice was a kulak. You didn’t experience this anymore. Later we imitated this in the Republic. We used to say they’re our “model”. As I was against this “model” they sentenced me to seven years of prison in Jáchymov, just because I didn’t want this kind of management.”

“He was Polish and they did everything there, cleaning up, etc… And the Jews went to work there. One day the Jews didn’t come. We saw that the Jews were digging a long ditch on the other side of the town. It was about a hundred, maybe two hundred meters long, two meters wide and two meters deep. They were digging it for roughly half a year. One day, I think it was in July, they took them to this ditch and executed all of the 16 000 Jews on this one day.”