František Šťastný

"We attacked in the evening. I don’t even recall the name of that village - Machnowka or something like that. The Germans had been watching us. They started firing signal flares and the place was just as light as a day. They also opened fire from mine throwers. The Germans had katyushas, and the Russians had vanyushas. Those who ran got shot. Those who laid down and crawled like I have saved themselves. I was crawling all the way to the forest and a Russian soldier who was standing there shouted at me: ´Stop, where are you going?!´ I was not running, but at that time you had no idea where you were or where your unit was. The Russian heard that I could speak Russian too, and he showed me where to go, and thus I reached our unit."

"While the Germans were there, they were helping me. Those Germans were not the owners, who were detained in Postoloprty at that time. They were Germans who were helping the farmers, and when they were then forcibly deported, I remained there all by myself! The farm had an area of ninety hectares! I had two pairs of horses, a tractor, five cows, and village bull--it was a large farm."

"I had to bury the corpses. The Russians arrived there first and they went like cattle for slaughter. The Russians were like: hooray, hooray, hooray! They walked, they had no tank. They were just the infantry and they didn’t have anything. The Germans just sprayed them with submachine-gun fire. There were some (I'm not exaggerating) two thousand dead Russian soldiers! A bulldozer then arrived, dug a hole in the ground, moved the mass of corpses there just as they were, with weapons and everything, and covered it with ground. Then they brought in the Jews and did the same thing again. Over there, by the place where I had lived, there are four of these mass graves. Once people start digging there, they will find them. The Germans dug a hole, put some limewash in there and the Jews were falling in; they were still alive as they were shooting them with submachine guns and they were still moving when the bulldozer was covering the hole. They finished off three transports of Jews and two transports of Russians like this."

"I heard from friends that Dukla was a useless operation. General Svoboda himself was punished for ordering the people to go up there, when there were only a few Germans on that mountain. If they had surrounded the place instead, perhaps it would not have ended like this. But today it is too late to speak about it, too late."