Jiří Lysuk

“There were eight thousand Jews in Kremenec, and they always drove them there. It was near the sugar factory in Kremenec, they dug their own grave, it was a hole bigger than our house. They drove a group of them there. Children, women, men. They took off their clothes and because I went for the watch, I took their clothes to Belokrenice. There were women who undid the clothes and looked for coins. And there were Germans watching them, so they did not steal the coins. When the Jews took off their clothes they had to lie down on the dead ones and he shot them with machine gun. He killed some of them and some of them not. And then, when they buried the Jews, there was a spring of blood.”

“We were attacking next to the station in the second attack. There was a meadow and it was blue with German infantry. And with tanks - Tigers. And we were only twenty in our company. It was a company... today it is two hundreds-sixty. And we were only twenty. And the machine-gunner Babič, he was our machine-gunner and the Germans shot him from a tank and he was smashed into pieces. And I, idiot, was Warrant Officer Class 1 so I jumped there, I grabbed the machine gun and we were given order to retreat so we retreated. Do you know how to retreat? One group stays down, supports the others by shooting and the others run and then lie down and support the first group by shooting. And as I stood up and took the machine gun, I was shot into my leg and it amputated my leg in ankle. It literally cut it off. I fell and I got up again, you do not feel the wound. You only feel as if you were stung by a bee. And I fell again and told myself ‘Oops, I don´t have a foot anymore.‘ It was with a shoe near to me.”