"There was only a tiny trail leading through the territory and nearby, the farmers used to have their hay stacks. I saw a number of soldiers coming to the stack to take some of the hay and ending up without a hand or a leg or even dead because of a mine that had been hidden there."
"My hand got injured right here, there is still a grenade fragment in it. Some Russian surgeon removed it subsequently. Afterwards I was in the hospital, I don’t even know for how long."
"We went to the forest searching for wood, we had horses with us. We had to take the road where there were no mines. We arrived in the forest and saw a turned-over coach that had gone the opposite way and hit a mine. One horse and a soldier were dead. You could see that it had not been the first time as the trees around the road were thrashed and littered with guts and bits of scattered human bodies."
"We were told they would come to our village to take the young people away with them. So we wanted to run to the ravine but I was caught and beaten. They had their machine guns pointed at my head and they were shooting next to my head. They chased me back home and when I got there I was badly bruised all over my body from the whip lashing I had suffered."
Václav Zumr, a retired Captain, was born on December 28, 1925, in Hrušvice na Volyni in what was then Poland. He completed seven grades of primary school in Omelanština. After the arrival of the Red Army, he left for Rovno where he would be mobilized into the 1st Czechoslovak Army Corps that was just being constituted at the time. During the mobilization, there was an air raid in the city of Rovno. In the course of the raid, Václav Zumr was injured and he had to be treated in the hospital. After his recovery, he joined the 1st Czechoslovak Army Corps on June 9, 1944, in Kamenec Podolský. He was trained as a radio operator and was assigned to the 3rd Brigade with which he participated in the fighting for Krosno and the Carpatho-Dukla Operation. He was demobilized after the war and settled down near Žatec. At first he worked as a private farmer, later as an accountant for the agricultural cooperative. Later he lived in Žatec. Václav Zumr passed away on June, 21st, 2012.
Hrdinové 20. století odcházejí. Nesmíme zapomenout. Dokumentujeme a vyprávíme jejich příběhy. Záleží vám na odkazu minulých generací, na občanských postojích, demokracii a vzdělávání? Pomozte nám!
