Vladimír Fros

“My father got from someone this quartz radio set and put up an antenna. It was strictly forbidden of course but anyway we listened to the broadcast and heard that a group of Czechoslovaks is being organized, a group of those fleeing Czechoslovakia and many of them were fleeing through Volhynia. Some of the Volhynians, mostly those who were a bit older, were joining them on their flight to the Soviet Union. Some of these people then were moving on to the Middle East. So we had these news but it was extremely difficult to receive it, as it was frequently disturbed. Sometimes it didn’t work at all, sometimes it was just all sorts of insignificant news. But from this one broadcast we knew that Czechoslovaks are organizing themselves in the Soviet Union.”

“I sat on the look-out post. We had fixed our turns, up to six hours of watch, depending on the weather. Then the watch would change. I had binoculars to observe the entire battlefront. Even in the night we were observing the flashes. From this post we were virtually directing the fire of our battery.”

“We had these first-aid courses in school. They trained us for the defense of our country, it was a tremendous catchword – the defense of the nation. A lot of the teaching in the schools was devoted to these things. In the winter we had theory and in the summer we had various practical outdoor activities like rifle firing, marching, camping, physical exercises etc. The more select ones underwent more rigorous exercising, training with equipment and those less select weren’t required to participate, they weren’t accepted to the military preparation courses. It was a matter of choice. Who wanted to participate could do so provided he had the physical capacities. I was a good swimmer and exercised regularly. I passed all the physical checks well. I mastered the bar and the strength exercises. We had this big pond in my place so I was swimming regularly. I once even saved the life of a younger colleague of mine. He would have drowned if didn’t save him. His name was Lojzíček, right?”

“The Germans shelled us the first day. The next day it was calm. We were in the military training. There was a certain Václav Štěpánek which died afterwards, then Jíra, who has passed away too - my colleagues. A Soviet official approached us. He was the chief of “paspornovo stola”, this means he issued the passports. He knew us well. He knew who we were and so on. He told us: “Boys, you have to do something.” So we went to the airport – I knew this airport well as I had spent some time observing it during my countless walks there. He wanted us to dig trenches there, he said they didn’t have to be deep but they must be long. After he showed us how to do it we did it and we disappeared – it was at night of course. My parents knew that an official came for me so they were frightened, of course, that something would happen to me. The next day afternoon we heard some noise from the airport. The German planes were landing on the airport. It was planes of the type Messerschmitt 109, they were attempting to land on the airport. But they overlooked the ditches on the runway so when the first plane was landing, it hit the ditch with a wheel and this tore off the entire aircraft landing gear and made the plane come to a screeching halt on his nose. The pilot of the second airplane didn’t manage to interrupt the landing maneuver as they were landing in close intervals to each other. He crashed into the crash-landed first airplane. This repeated itself one more time so what I’m trying to say is that me and Štěpánek and Jíra took down three German fighters, three German fighter planes on the second day of war. It was in Luck, on the Luck airport.”