“Shock. Shock, nothing else. As reconnoitres we went first, and a Russian soldier was lying there and I asked him how far it was to the front. This was right in front of Krosno. And he replied: ´Kilometrou dvacať,´ twenty kilometres. And they were already approaching us over a meadow. The Germans wanted to capture us. We could have become prisoners the very first day.”
“While there, there were young guys whose hair had turned gray. Just imagine it, when they started firing at us. They got the range there and in Dukla there was such a narrow road, and we had to take it, otherwise we wouldn’t have got there. And they got the range on that road.”
“The Bandera’s bands were in every village. They would come, eat and drink. One day they came just before a village feast. It was the Sunday after St. Wenceslas. My mom had baked cakes, and they ate everything we had, and left.”
“We did feel fear. What were we to do? The field gendarmes were behind us, and we had to advance, for had we stayed there, it would have been bad. Svoboda included, a nahan in his hand, and we went.”
“As soon as we arrived to Romania, the very first day they boarded us onto a train and transported us there, and the first day we started building dugouts in which we slept. Do you know what a dugout looks like? Green branches, it began raining and water with mud was pouring through it.”
Josef Valenta was born October 23, 1921 in Hlinsk, Volhynia. He went to school in Hlinsk, where the teaching was conducted in Polish. In Volhynia he married Olga Charvátová and their son Jaromír was born. In March 1944 he voluntarily joined the 1st Czechoslovak army corps. In Rovno he was assigned to the mixed reconnaissance section. He received training in Bukovina, Romania. In September 1944 he was sent to the front in the vicinity of Krosno. His task was transmitting messages between the staff and the troops. He experienced the passage through the Dukla Pass. When the war ended he was in Přílepy near Holešov. After the war he was called to serve in the army group Žatec. On October 26 he was demobilized as a lance-corporal. He was given a farm in Německá Libina (present-day Libina), where he lived until the end of his life in March 2011.
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