Viktor Bejbl

"We've tried quite a few crossings and we've been knocked out from everywhere. There was even a military Gaz 69 that came with us from Maribor and took us about 40 kilometres back to the interior. There were no navigators or anything like that back then. So I studied the map and I studied a really miniature border crossing there called Kuzma. It was high up in the mountains and it was absolutely silent. And I ordered it to stop, and we looked at the chirping of that crossing. The barrier was raised on the Yugoslav side, and I thought it wouldn't be a problem. At that time, you only drove on so-called grey passports and they were only valid in Yugoslavia and nowhere else. I don't know if the Austrians didn't know that or what, and we had Austrian visas for that. We had them printed in Zagreb - Austrian visas in our passports. And I don't know if they just didn't know, or I can't explain it to this day. The Yugoslavians, they were drunk, we didn't care about them at all. And we arrived at the Austrian crossing and the boys were dozing there. And when they heard the engine, they came and raised the barrier, and we showed them our visas and they just said, 'Go!' And we were in Austria."

"They loaded us [in Odessa] into a gazik, which was an off-road car, and took us somewhere. There we were ushered into some kind of dungeon where there was a light bulb burning near the ceiling, which was extremely high, maybe eight or ten meters high, which the Russians at that time called Leninka. It had a wattage of only 15 watts, so the light that it was giving off didn't come down to the ground. It was already half-light. And it was a huge room, and there were about 45 of us, no difference in gender, no difference in age. And we had Moscow bread to eat and a pitcher of water. That was always there. We went to the toilet on demand, on a knock on the door. They kept us like that for four days. Then the 'kamandirs' came and blindfolded us so we wouldn't go blind because we were there in the dark. But it was still a terrible blow to the eyes. We could see almost nothing that morning. They loaded us onto a ZIL truck and drove us all the way across the Ukraine to the border crossing at Čierna pri Čope, or something like that. And there the nice driver turned on the tipping mechanism of the truck and dumped us like a pile of coal. Well, we were just there... we thought it was war, to be honest. We didn't have any information, so we were guessing what was going on. No contact with the embassy, absolutely nothing, no discussions, nothing. And it was only here in that Montenegro that we learned that our allied brothers had attacked us viciously and started to make their own arrangements. We were also immediately advised that there was an Austrian crossing nearby and to head there quickly. And I, like an idiot, didn't do it."