Sergeant (ret.) Antonín Vaník

"People believed the Germans - they hoped they would free us from the Russians. But the Ukrainians did not believe them, saying the regimes are the same. And then everybody found it out."

"There were some air raids in Rovno but it was not so bad. But when we were going from Dubno to Luck, some planes attacked us before Zdolbunov. Fortunately, it was at night so they dropped the bombs somewhere else and did not hit the train. Our train was changing the place - sometimes it moved forward and then backward.

"There was a valley behind Machnówka and then there was a forest. The Germans were in the forest. We lost a lot of soldiers and the infantry was so devastated that we had to withdraw and go back to Machnówke where we defended ourselves. We had been keeping the line since 3 o´clock. When it got dark, we had to lay down communication cables. So we were putting the cable down but before we got to the place where we should have got, we were ordered to go back. So we returned to Machnówka and our battalion left for another village."