Vítězslav Moravec

"He was the LT Linha, Václav Linha. He was a student of the Moscow officer school. He removed successfully tons of mines. He was a good man and a good friend. He survived the war luckily. During the border lines demarcation of the Carpathian Ruthenia and Slovakia, all of the mines must have been removed again. He went there with his group and although he was brilliant in theory as well as practically he died there. He didn’t come back. Because one of the German mines which was placed on a wheel can spread its pieces to far distance in order to hurt as many soldiers as possible. Depended on how high it was attached he didn’t have to die as he fell down. But he unfortunately touched another ground mine which he didn’t know about and that caused his life. It was the second one. Not the first one. After I always heard stories like this one I wanted to leave the army."

"He was aiming good, straight on my chest. But the bullet went a little lower than he meant to. That must have been my guardian angel. The bullet hit the butt-end and destroyed it and the cartridge chamber. That was much harder; you can sure imagine the snout of the cartridge chamber. It speed up and flew around my ear whistling. When it whistled I heard it to hit my spoon. It knocked the spoon over, because it was only slightly pressed to the ground. I was standing there in amusement about what happened. I thought to myself, I was jus born for the second time. I have covered the loophole between the trees, poured out the water which was there using my mess tin and then jumped into the shelter again. I thanked to God for saving my life."

"One of my MEZ Postřelmov colleagues lived here in Vikýřovice village. He used to have a house there, but he sold it two days ago. He intended to move to Walachia. When he heard the rumor about the monetary reform he decided to end his life. He just couldn’t put up with it. He was alone. He hanged himself."

"We were so thirsty that - although it was already close to Barvínek and although it was in the mountains, the ground was kind of wet as the swamp or something. Where you stepped with your foot, you left a hole behind. And most of the water was in these holes. But how do we get the water out now? We found some straw from the grass around and drank the water by using the straw. We were drinking until there was nothing left. Thank God we never experienced any cholera or something."

"We used to live as I already mentioned: a village with two churches built face to face. One of them was catholic and the other one orthodox. There was some kind of religion intolerance from the orthodox side mainly, but also from the Catholics against the members of other Churches. We used to live like that back then. Today, the life is different. For an example Baptist couldn’t be buried anywhere else than on Baptist cemetery. I guess the dead ones would have a row with each other because of that. Despite the fact that we lived there, my father was so popular, that when he died in 1942, both of the Churches wanted to burry him - Orthodoxy and the Catholic too. And they had no problem with that at all."

"Speaking of the anniversaries, I remember there was a very tiny village in Slovakia - I think it was called Bobrovec - so small you wouldn’t find it on any map. But it was completely full of mines. They ordered three corporals, namely Moravec, Růžička and Gelbič to perform the minesweeping there. We got rid of three hundreds and fifty mines in just one day. So you can imagine how many mines all together we found the next day too."