“The morning was foggy; you could not see more than one step ahead of you. Around nine o’clock the fog cleared. We got terrible thrashing from the German artillery offensive, we lost most of our people there. Our infantrymen were running away, it was horrible, and us, the anti-aircraft artillery of the third brigade, remained there as the front line... For one hour, there was shooting from the German side, two Messerschmitts came down on us, we did not shoot them down, but they eventually turned back. The German infantry was storming in upon us.”
I was born in Volyně, on January 2nd, 1921, in the village of Zawidow. The entire village was Czech. My parents were independent farmers, independent till the Soviets came. Then, there were the kolkhozs. I stayed with my father, but during Hitler’s occupation I was sent to do forced labour. I worked on a railroad, in Ukraine. The transformation into kolkchozs, that happened right away. They took our lands, they took everything.”
It was that night that I got burnt. We used those Russian “koptilka” lamps, they were filled with gasoline and there was a wick that kept burning. When I returned to the bunker and saw the koptilka lamp just about to die out, I thought: ´I need to put some more gasoline in.´ But you always had to add some salt to the gasoline first, to prevent it from exploding, I believed the salt was already in the bottle, but it was pure gasoline instead. As I was pouring in more gas, the wick was protruding from the bottle and burning bright and all of a sudden, the gasoline vapours caught fire and the bottle in my hand got ablaze as well. I threw the bottle away, the whole bunker, where the others were lying, caught fire as well. I ran outside and started to roll in the snow on the ground, my body was also on fire. I burnt till I lost consciousness, and my comrades ran to me and allegedly they threw some blanket over my body and thus saved me.
“With my own eyes I saw them shooting the Jews. There was a so-called chalk mountain, a cement quarry, where they were mining chalk using a cable-car. There they had the Jews dig holes, and one night an SA or SS commando came and during the whole night they were bringing the Jews in and shooting them. I did not see the machine guns, I only heard them. I was there with my friend, and there was a suspended railways bridge, so we climbed onto that bridge and looked right towards the chalk mountain where they were bringing them. The trucks which they used were red. The Jews were running away, jumping down from the trucks, and the SS men shot whoever was moving. Naked they were falling down to those holes. From this place it was 600 metres to the chalk mountain. All the people in the village knew what was going on. They annihilated the entire ghetto in one night. Many of them ran away and then the Gestapo men started chasing the Jews. They caught even many more of them afterwards.”
In that Pener company, where we worked on the railroad, an SS man was coming there everyday. He would always arrive on a motorized carriage, a gun in one hand, a whip in the other. His name was Franz. He could speak Polish and German as well. He was beating people. We were carrying the rails and he would stand behind us and whip us... And now imagine this: the war was over, we already had a television, and I was just shaving right here when I hear they are speaking about Nürnberg, so I go there and exclaim: Oh my God, this is Franz. They were just showing the Nürnberg trials and I recognized him on TV. He was also convicted and got a death penalty.
“What would I recommend to the following generations? Never to let the communist party seize power again with the programme they had had when we were young: when they robbed us of everything, devastated everything and we had to eke out our living.”
First lieutenant in retirement Josef Brabenec was born January 2nd 1921 in Záwidow in the Volyně region. His father worked as a farmer, mother was a housewife. The Brabenec family owned six hectares of land. During the German occupation he was sent to do forced labour in Ukraine, where he worked in a Soviet-administered kolkhoz. Soon after, young Josef had to commence employment in the Pener factory (employed there from 1941 till 1943) in the town of Zdolbunov, where the workers were altering the width of railway tracks to fit the Russian standard. There, Mr. Brabenec participated in resistance activities under the leadership of the illegal organization of Volyně Czechs called Blaník. His task was to monitor movements of German trains on a nearby railroad line. During that time, Mr. Brabenec was also a witness to a ruthless massacre of Jews on the chalk mountain. After the Russians had returned to the area, Mr. Brabenec decided to search for the Czechoslovak army, of whose existence he had heard from the radio. After joining the army, he went through the KPÚV training (Cannons against offensive vehicles), and later during a subsequent training in Rumanian Černovice he was transferred to an anti-aircraft artillery unit. On September 9th, 1944, following a massive artillery preparation, Mr. Brabenec and his unit moved towards Dukla. An order came, commanding them to dig trenches near the village of Wrocanka. The following morning it became evident they were facing a well-prepared enemy. On October 6th, 1944 Brabenec´s united celebrated their arrival to Slovakia He suffered severe burns and it took him four months to recover; he spent this time mainly in hospitals in Slovakia, Saratov, Přemysl and Ural. Afterwards, while moving to meet the substitute artillery regiment in Humenné, he stopped to visit his family in Volyně, where the end of the war found him. After the war he moved to a farm in Milešov near Lovosice. Till 1951, Mr. Brabenec worked as an independent farmer together with his wife Jana (who came from a Czech-German family); they had four children. Fearing Bolshevik persecution, he joined the collectivized agricultural units in 1951. Mr. Brabenec retired in 1988. Josef Brabenec died in 2004.
