Gustav Singer

"When I was a student, (1932) I wanted to travel with my friend to France once - we wanted to hitchhike. I went to the police station to apply for my passport and there they told me: ´Of course, no problem.’ I spoke with the Austrian accent.’ But you have to ask your father to provide the Austria citizenship certificate.´ I´ve asked my dad and he told me:’ I never needed one, I was in Austrian army.´ He just didn´t have it, so I went back to the police station. They asked me where my father was born. ´In Western Slovakia´ I told them. ´In that case you have to write a letter to Slovakia and ask them to send you the documents saying that you have a Slovakian citizenship from your father, therefore you´ll become a Czechoslovak citizen.´"

"I admired one thing: at night we arrived with our ambulance in a line of other vehicles. When we got there the traffic officer came to our ambulance and put his head into the driver´s window: ´No stops allowed, ´ he said in Russian. That means that we couldn´t stop even for a single minute. You can´t stop even if your car breaks down. We had to unload the medical material as fast as we could and then load it on a different truck. You either fit in there or you had to walk behind it. The Dnieper River is quite wide in this part - about few hundred meters. And your car... you have to drown it in the river. The entire division must cross the river during one night. Not only our squads or brigades, but the entire Russian division had to cross the river."

"On September 1st the Germans attacked Poland. At the very same moment we were about nine kilometers from the German border in Katowice. Luckily, they attacked north of Poland first. Katowice is situated in the very south, right. All women and children had time to leave on the last train. There were not enough places for everyone though. The Poles and our citizens all wanted to run away from the Germans. We, the men, had to walk in small groups on the road and it was pre-arranged that we all meet in Kielce. That was about hundred and fifty kilometers past the border line. According to our experiences from WWI, that was the deep end of the front. But when we arrived to Kielce we found that because of the German air raids and fast tank movement, all women with children left the village and walked in small groups further east with no particular destination. Therefore, we had no choice but to follow them. Me and one friend went together without knowing where my wife was. My only hope was that after the war - if I survived- I wouldl try to find my wife through the Red Cross organization."

"The next evening our company (the second one), just like the others, received the order to make a counter attack and to take Sokolovo city again. The medical unit always walked at the very end in order to collect the injured ones and to provide health care. I remember as we were progressing through the ice at night - the Germans noticed us all of a sudden. We were very close to Sokolovo already and about 100 meters behind our formations. The Germans began to fire from machine guns which had a range of 800 to 1000 meters. We were partly protected by our helmets, but still it depends on the strength of the shot. But I remember one thing: I was progressing together with my wife and one other nurse and when they started to fire at us there was no place for us to hide; no tree or hill. We laid down on the ice. You can imagine, we wore the battledress we got from the English soldiers, but for the Russian kind of winter it was insufficient, so we got extra padded jackets that were protecting us from the Russian freeze. At this point the jackets were soaked with the icy water, which was quite unpleasant, but we couldn´t think of such things at that moment."

"The activity of the army medical service depends mostly on which level of the military organization the doctor or nurse is situated. The lowest level is the squad; each squad has a medic with the medical bag containing bandages and possibly painkiller shots. There´s nothing else the medic can do, because he´s progressing with the squad, which means with the front teams which are always in the field of direct enemy fire. If soldier is injured they have to grab him and pull him away to some better protected place like e.g. lowland terrain, where they can be protected from the machine gun fire. They are never protected from the grenades though, because they fall from above. In such places the medic is able to undress the soldier and find the injury. The first thing he has to do is find the damaged blood vessel or artery - he has to use elastic bandages (considering that the injury is on your leg or arm) and tie it firmly above the injury to stop the bleeding in the quickest way. After that he has to arrange quick transportation for the soldier who will be carried on a stretcher and then possibly taken by ambulance to the first check point. Atn the battalion aid station, there might be an ambulance waiting which will take the soldier to the next location which in this case was a regimental or brigade aid station. There, doctors are able to work on their patients. They can perform simple surgeries to stop the bleeding. The next level of the medical care is the division. It is higher than the regiment or brigade. And there you could find something like a division mobile hospital. The tent is built in a suitable place which is close to a water source and close to transport vehicles, roads etc. In order to be protected from air raids it was more convenient to build it in the woods or some similar place... There are operating tables in the field hospital as well as the surgical team, more doctors, more equipment, nurses who take care of the sterilization of scalpels, scissors, tweezers etc. Even more serious surgeries could be done there."