Pavel Dimun

“After that, I became inconvenient for the Castle Guard, and so I went to work in the court guard, but even there I was regarded as "inconvenient". And so they locked me up. My wife went to see Dr. Vaš, reminding him that he knew me, and that even the president was asking why I had been imprisoned. The thing was that I was an old communist, and I had not joined the Party. This Doctor Vaš told my wife that I would not go anywhere and stay there. He even had my attorney, who had allowed me to have visitors, to be exchanged on the behalf of another to lead the investigation of my case. Thus I was sentenced to nine months of imprisonment. I served my term and this was the end of the war for me. I’m still alive.”

“We were a patrol of three men, we were armed with bayonets, but we were strictly forbidden to hurt anybody. People in Jablonec were shouting "Heil Hitler" with the Nazi greeting, like they still know to do, even today. We were patrolling in the suburbs of the town. I could not speak German and so I was not alarmed, but the other two soldiers probably understood German. There were little girls, five or six years old, walking by in skirts – and you know what they did? They spat out and said: ´Pah, Czech swine!´”

Mr. Dimun: “When they took my daughter to hospital, Košice was not occupied yet. My wife was pregnant with our son Pavel at that time.” Mr. Dimun’s daughter: “The doctor who operated on me was an old Slovak doctor. The reason I lost my eye was because I had been in the field with grandpa and as the wind was blowing, I developed some eye inflammation. In the hospital in Košice they feared that the infection might get into the other eye because they had no time to treat me. Košice was in darkness, and therefore they removed my eye, even though my mother had not signed the consent. She was on her way there but she didn’t make it: she gave birth to my brother in a ditch by the road. Some soldiers found her, and she told them that she was in labour. They were laughing, and they lifted her skirt to look, and the baby was already out there in the ditch. They separated the umbilical cord for her, and my mom didn’t even know that I had already undergone the surgery. Then they drove her to Habura. Because of this, I have lost my eye, and paid a price for it.”

“I called First Lieutenant Reicin, asking him to send somebody else to my post, because I had such a cold that I was unable to move. He told me: ´Moving or not moving, you have be there! Do whatever you want! ´ And so I said to this telephone operator, this Volhynian Czech: ´Run away from here, but first help me bring some deadwood to make fire in the stove.´ ´But there will be smoke and the Germans will see it.´ ´So they’ll see it, I don’t care, ´ I replied. It would be a pity if they killed this boy, and so he ran away, I don’t know where. I started fire in the stove, and smoke began coming out. Then the sun rose, and one could see it far away. Reicin called me and asked: ´What are you doing in there? ´ ´Well, I’m sweating. I covered myself with these lousy German blankets.´ ‘But the Germans are going to kill you. And where’s that boy? ´ ´OK, they’ll kill me then. I sent the boy away, ´ I told him. Eventually, what happened was that the Germans regarded this as a provocation to incite them to open fire, but they did not even fire a single bullet.”