“I knew about that before I went to war, as in the village where I was born, next to it there was this town of Senkevychivka and they would just gather all the Jews from the neighboring villages and there were about 600 of them. I had a brother and my brother had been digging a grave for those Jews. Not by himself, it was near the forest, there were more of them, I don't know how many. And they shot those 600 Jews there, it was a horrible scene I suppose as they had to go downstairs into the pit. And they had to kneel, the first ones on the ground, and after that they were just kneeling on each other, and the SS-men were walking around on the surface with machine guns and they were shooting them. So I experienced such a thing even before I went to war.”
“At the end of the war I got hepatitis. We were hungry and the Germans were throwing away all those cans and food while retreating and I – a foolish boy – ate some of that and got hepatitis. I was as yellow as wax. I couldn't eat anything, I had no clue what hepatitis was. And I wanted to see Prague so I kept going with hepatitis for may 14 days. And as we came to Prague, we came on May 17th, as for reasons unknown to me we were camped maybe 10 kilometers away from Prague. There we were waiting, I didn't know why, so we could have this parade in Prague on May 17th. We had to clean cars, cannons and so on. I would say that we should come right from the front line, we should come to Prague as we were. And after we came to Prague, they took me to Bulovka Hospital right away where I spent 14 days.”
“Everyone is afraid of dying, no matter what he says. But that's how it was. As we were hungry, dirty, lousy, just everything you wouldn't like to experience, as we could take a bath maybe once in a month. And after one hour we had to go back. We slept in the trenches. I slept in a bed just once. In this village I slept in a bed, in fact I slept on this pile of straw. And I was so happy that I could sleep in a bed. Otherwise we would sleep outside, even in the winter. My children were asking me: 'Father, where does a soldier sleep in the winter?' Well, where does he sleep, in Slovakia, in the mountains, there was little more snow, little more cold than here in the South Moravia. We would dig up this hole in the snow over there in which we would be lying, we would put some branches in it and sleep there. Not always, as as we would be camping for a longer period of time, there would be some trenches being dug up. And when it was raining or snowing, you had to dry your clothes on your body, as there was no way of going somewhere to warm yourself and dry your clothes, there was nothing like that.”
Josef Hejral was born on February 19th 1927 in the village of Budky Hubinské in Volhyina. At the beginning of the Second world war, he witnessed outbursts of violence and clashes along the ethnic lines, as well as Germans murdering Jews and other inhabitants of Volhyina. In 1944 he joined the 1st Czechoslovak Army Corps and was designated to serve as a radio operator at the artillery unit. With his unit he went fighting from the Dukla Pass to Prague (Praha). He sustained light wounds and his brother died fighting. After the war he settled in Czechoslovakia, got married and started a family. He graduated from a school of agriculture and had been working as an agronomist at the Collective Farm in Branišovice. Josef Hejral died in 2008.
