“The started the fire and they blew the town to smithereens. The name of the town was Krościenko. We found it odd that the church still remained standing. We thus went to report it and said that the town had been bombed, but the church was still standing. He ordered us: ´The six of you go there and find out why the church is still standing.´”
“There was a dog and they fired at him and shot off its tail. He thus took his rifle and shot the dog in the had. The dog groaned, fell to the ground, and these other dogs were right after him. They were probably hungry and they wanted to devour it. There was a ruin of some castle and all of a sudden, two shots were fired from behind the castle walls and those two dogs fell dead.”
“They began shouting: ´Die Russen sind schon da.´ The Russians are here again. And they took to their heels. We did shoot quite a lot of them. Over a hundred of dead Germans were lying on a field there. Young fifteen-year-old boys shooting fifteen-year-old boys, collecting their submachine guns and shooting at them and chasing them all the way to the nearest village. The Germans didn’t even have time to escape.”
“He served in the Czechoslovak army as an NCO with a Slovak soldier. He cursed the Slovak: ´You Bolshevik, I will hand you over to the Germans, you’ll see.´ But he didn’t do it, because the Slovak saved his life. A heavy artillery shell exploded close to this NCO, and he was buried under the debris, but the Slovak man got him out and carried him to a nursing station. He has saved his life.”
“There were Czechs who had some property and labourers from surrounding villages were coming to work there. They were earning only sixty hallers and working from dawn to dusk. They were working on a beet field. The only way to earn some real money was to work on a hops farm, because there you were paid by a bushel. You got as many coupons as the number of bushels you harvested. When the harvest season was over and the hops were being dried in the drying rooms, they were given their wage. My mom was going there to pick hops and I was helping her, at times when I was supposed to take the cows to the pasture instead. (laughing) We lived in a rented room. It was a shed, a shed appended to a house, and the hops drying room was in the attic. That’s where we lived.”
Staff Warrant Officer in retirement Antonín Mora was born December 27, 1923 in the village of Kvasilov in Volhynia in the then Poland. He studied eight grades of Czech school and then he found a job in a local brewery. While in Volhynia he experienced the Soviet and Nazi occupation of West Ukraine. In 1942-1944 he cooperated with the Soviet partisans of colonel Medvěděv. He was passing information to them and once he even joined them in defending a Ukrainian village from Nazi soldiers. On March 15, 1944 he joined the newly formed 1st Czechoslovak army corps, the 2nd paratroopers brigade in Jefremov and he was trained as a paratrooper. After the training in Jefremov the soldiers were transported to Proskurov and they had their first combat experience at the city of Krosno. The brigade was then flown to the Slovak airport Tri Duby in order to support the Slovak National Uprising. This was however put down quickly and in the ensuing chaos Antonín Mora and other soldiers withdrew to the mountains and began fighting as partisans. They were eventually reunited with their army corps in Kežmarok and then they were deployed to the Slovak-Hungarian border to monitor the deportation of Hungarian citizens. Antonín Mora was subsequently sent to the Podbořany and Louny region and when the war turmoil finally ended, he was given a farm near Horšovský Týn. He worked as an independent farmer until the establishment of the Unified Agricultural Cooperatives. Although he did join the cooperative, he didn‘t work in agriculture for long, and he joined the army again. He served in Horšovský Týn, Kdyně, and Žatec. Later he moved to Horažďovice, where he worked in the mines. Antonín Mora passed away April, the 7th, 2014.
Hrdinové 20. století odcházejí. Nesmíme zapomenout. Dokumentujeme a vyprávíme jejich příběhy. Záleží vám na odkazu minulých generací, na občanských postojích, demokracii a vzdělávání? Pomozte nám!
