Naděžda Laubová

One of my friends from the army told me that one day he was driving a jeep and carrying somebody in the back hidden under a blanket. Bandera’s members stopped him when he was waiting in front of a barrier on a railway crossing. He told them that he was not a Russian, that he was from the Czech army. ´We like that,´ they told him. ´And where are you going?´ He explained that he was going to his unit, returning from a visit. ´OK, go then,´ they said to him and they haven’t even searched his car.

When the Germans came to us, they surrounded the whole village and started shooting. A few houses burned down there. My sister and I ran away in a night dress. It was before Easter, everything still frosted. We laid there on a field below piles of manure until morning. After dawn we returned home. My father had a lumbago, was lying in a bed and couldn’t run away. The Germans came in and wanted to shoot him in bed but than he said that he was Czech and at once one of the Germans spoke Czech to him. He was from Sudetenland. Then they plundered everything possible in the village, took away our cow, our pig, everything. Not before evening of the other day we returned home.

They wanted to sent me to Donbas to work in the mines, women had to work in coal mines during the war, and I was ordered to go there when they closed our school. We thus went to the Czech army with the girls, and I was then afraid to come back. That was because my mom wrote to me: ´Do not come home.´ But she didn’t say why. My cousin then told me: ´Don’t come home, because mom is afraid that if you came, they would put you in prison.´

During the German occupation, my father’s older brother was locked up for a fortnight in a cellar, in water. He had a varicose ulcer. They did it because he lent the Russian guerilla a hair clipper because as guerilla combatants they were in woods, maybe they caught lice or something. So they came at night, knocked on a window because someone told them that this family had a hair clipper. It might have been the one in the whole village. So they came there, my aunt lent it to them and uncle got arrested. And as he was just about to die, the Russians arrived. Before the Germans left, he was still locked up there. Then he ran home and died two weeks later as he got a poison into his legs. So such atrocities they would do for any trifle. They would check our bags on our way to school and such...

She went to the front to see me. She was searching for me for six weeks until she found me. She was riding with Czech officers. My mom was a sportswoman… She slept on rail cars with coal. And then the officers offered her a ride in a jeep, in a Studebaker. She had a roast turkey and a goose, and a demijohn of vodka and cigarettes. All this was for the drivers so that they would give her a ride.

We arrived there (to Dukla) in fall already. It was cold, we would sleep in a wood for instance, in foxholes, dugouts, as we could. Also on lorries, on cars, we would always get branchlets. We might have had palliasse but no straws. So we would put branches below ourselves, rain-coats into the middle and we would always sleep by two as to warm up. On the sixth of October we crossed our border. And I remember that we planted a flag there, kneeled down and kissed the land. As young girls we wanted to survive so badly, to get to the fatherland from which out grandfathers originated.

As we were getting up in the morning, we saw SS men riding motorcycles on the road, followed by Ukrainians who were driving stolen cattle. At first they had surrounded the village and then took the pigs and cows. My neighbour’s daughter was married to a man in Remel, and the girl had just given birth and she was lying in bed with the baby and both of them died in fire there. But they had chased the cattle and pigs away first, and then they put the whole village on fire.