Bernard Menachovský

“The Germans had a very bad reputation – they raped someone there, they were beating up people, they stole a horse, they killed a cow – you know, they did this kind of things whereas the Soviets weren’t behaving like this. The Russians weren’t doing this sort of things. I was in Poprad because I had some business there with a Soviet unit that was permanently stationed there. I was in the Czechoslovak Army and had to deal with a Soviet officer in some official matter. Suddenly I hear an old woman screaming: ‘Get him, catch him, catch him!’ So I watched what was happening. I saw a Soviet soldier running and an old woman that was after him. The Soviet General I was talking to asked his aide to take her to him. He asked her what was the matter and she said that the soldier had stolen her hen. So the General ordered his men to catch the soldier and take him to him. They caught him and brought him to the Soviet General. The General asked the old woman: ‘Is this the one who was stealing?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Did you steal the hen?’ ‘Yes, but we’re hungry.’ ‘Where is it?’ The soldier pulled it out from underneath his jacket and the old woman got her hen back. The General then pulled out his gun and shot the soldier at the spot. The old woman said: ‘you shot a man because of a hen?’ ‘I don’t want that hen anymore.’ And she threw it away. The General said: ‘This is not about the hen. A Soviet soldier is a liberator, not a thief!’”

“Once we did a dance evening in the village, in the town where we lived. There we established ... They didn’t have anything like that, it just didn’t exist – they had no music like this. We had music normally. Thus our band played tango and some foxtrot – you know, the usual kind of music that was played back then. And of course, as you dance, you get in touch with girls. So I got in touch with this girl, she was in the eight grade, she was just before her exam. She was kind of an average in terms of beauty, compared to the other girls there. But her mother had the old Tsarist education. She belonged to the old Tsarist intelligentsia that the Soviet government then left aside. She was a teacher at a grammar school – she had been teaching there since the old Czarist days! And her father worked in a factory as an accountant, but he had been educated in the old days as well – he too had the old-days classical Russian education. They didn’t mind us being together so I joined their family’s company. Well, there wasn’t much time to spend together because I was constantly with the army – exercising and doing other stuff. But we had the free Sundays and it was enough for the band to play some music and for dancing with her on the evenings. It used to start at around four o’clock so we got there, danced, well, these were good times. And the company was a very enlightened one, I would say. They knew the Soviet literature, of course, but we didn’t speak about literature and we didn’t speak about work, so we were talking about love.”

“There’s this thing that happened to me in Kiev once. I was walking through the city which had been taken by our forces. I was walking by myself and as I was passing one deserted street I met an old woman with a little girl. This girl, she could have been seven, maybe eight years old – she was a little kid. And that grandma of hers, as the street was completely empty, she started to talk in Ukrainian, it was in Kiev, so she started to talk in Ukrainian: ‘Our liberators have liberated us’ and so on, this kind of things. I told the woman: ‘Yes we liberated you. Us and the Soviet army that fought with us’ and so on so forth. And that little girl stood by there and listened to what we were saying. All of a sudden, the woman poked her and told her: ‘Didn’t you hear that, he’s our liberator. Get down on your knees. You have to kiss his feet!’ This girl stared at her and she gave her another jab. ‘Kiss his feet!’ I told her grandma: ‘Ma, no, look at my feet, they’re all dirty.’ But she got on her knees and started to kiss my dirty boots.”

“I desperately wanted to get back into the Polish army. But they told me that I can’t get back to the Polish army, that the only army I can join is the Czechoslovak army. Because as a non-Russian, I couldn’t join the Soviet army either. So I told them that I’d join the Czechoslovak army. I said: ‘it’s all about the war. The important thing is to kill Germans and I can do that being in the Czechoslovak, Polish, American army or whatever army. I’m young and healthy and I want to fight, because they have occupied my country, just like they did occupy yours. There’s nothing about it.’ He seemed to be thinking about it and there was a higher Soviet officer there who said: ‘that boy is right, send him to the Czechoslovak army if the Poles don’t want him. The Czechoslovaks are taking everybody, they’re organizing themselves right now and they need more men. It’s all the same!’ So that’s how they sent me to the Czechoslovak army. So actually it was by chance how I ended up in the Czechoslovak army and then in Czechoslovakia. But I adjusted myself and was pretty quick in the transition to the Czech language. I started off by mixing Polish and Russian and then I was gradually perfecting my Czech. Even today my Czech is not perfect – I’m aware of it. You can probably hear some strange things when I talk but it’s ok now already.”