"We went with the horses to get provisions. It was somehow in Liptovský Hrádek. We stopped at the cemetery and the four of us loaded and stacked the kitchens and the provisions in the warehouses. It was from shrapnel. They threw a grenade from somewhere, they were about a hundred meters away from us, or a hundred and fifty, and the shrapnel went into my leg. But it wasn't much. In two or three days it was healed. And here in my chest."
"There were not enough shoes for the soldiers, so I had nothing to wear. When we were marching, about fifteen or twenty kilometres, one of my shoes broke. That shoe was cracking. When the commander said ʿattentionʾ, the rubber on my foot popped. So they put about three or four of us to clean potatoes for the men. Then there were about eight or nine of us who didnʼt have anything to put on or nothing to put on our feet, so they put us to clean beans or handpick beans, peas and lentils. Then we slowly learned to cook."
"I served in a mortar squad, a 100 mortar. I was a loader for those mortars. A 20-foot tube, a base, a plate on the bottom, and a machine gun. That's the way the war was fought. It's been a lot of years, I can't even imagine how long it's been."
Michal Kučera was born on 10 May 1925 in the village of Úpor (Sečovce district) in eastern Slovakia. On 13 January 1945, he was mobilized to the 1st Czechoslovak Army Corps in Humenne, where he served first as a loader in the mortar detachment and then in the supply detachment and in the field kitchen. He took part in the battles of Vrútky, Liptovský Hrádek, Liptovský Mikuláš and other liberation battles in Czechoslovakia. At Liptovský Hrádek he was wounded by a shrapnel in the chest and leg. After demobilization, he settled in the village of Rybník in the Český Krumlov district and worked in paper mills and then on the State Farm in Vyšší Brod and Rybník. At the time of filming (2009) he lived with his wife in the village of Rybník in the Český Krumlov district.
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