"We got up at six in the morning, we had these pots, we took them to the kitchen and they poured in a bit of tea. We didn't have any lunch at midday. We worked till six o'clock."
"Sergeant Erban, his old name was Echstein, a Prague lawyer, gave me the order to climb the tree. I had a field phone and I was supposed to report the movement of the German tanks. Suddenly the Germans started shooting, and I couldn't hide on the tree. So I called: Vojta, I can't hold out here. There's shells blowing up all around and I can't move. He replied: You have to stay! I only climbed when I was ordered to. I wasn't wounded till Dukla, I survived that time in Sokolovo."
"My sister wrote to me in Lvov, asking if she could join me, but I replied telling her not to, because the emigrants were in danger of being taken to a gulag. I knew that. But I didn't have a clue about what would happen to Czech Jews. In Lvov I unloaded sugar from train wagons. I got a few kopecks for that, with which I bought bread and rolls. I didn't have the money for anything special. Then they came for me from the NKVD, as they did for the other emigrants. We spent about a week in the Lvov barracks. Then they transported us by train to the gulag. No one knew what it would be like."
"Before I left, I worked in Český Těšín. I helped the emigrants. I solicited money for them from the Jewish community, and then I sat them on a bus to Katowice or Krakow. When I saw the swastika fly above Těšín's town hall, I decided to leave for Poland over the River Olše, to Lvov."
"Then the summons arrived, that the Czechoslovak army would be forming in Buzuluku, so I wrote to Kujbyšev (current day Samara - ed.), we had our mission there, and I received a telegram from general Píka, telling me to undertake the journey to Buzuluku. So I went to the military, Russian administration, and they gave me a padded shirt and trousers, and I crossed the whole of Kazakhstan to Buzuluku in twenty-eight days."
"After Sokolovo we fell back to the River Donec, because the enemy threatened to surround us. We were quartered in the little village of Veseloj, from there we transferred to Novokhopyorsk, were we formed a brigade."
"I was deported to the gulag in the Volgostroj area of the Yaroslavl district, near the city of Rybinsk. It looked very bad. We got two hundred grams of bread a day, if we fulfilled the working quota, they gave us sixty decagrams. Soup was twice a week and when there was an unpeeled potatoe floating in it, we would celebrate. We had a free day on the first of May, they gave us semolina porridge."
"Before that I managed a small company that made shaving blades in Kunratice, near Chomutov. There were some thirty people working there. When the Communists nationalised that, I was transferred to Karlín to the firm Maka, which I also headed. They wanted to move me to Jevíček in Moravia, but I didn't want that, so I left for the pharmacy lab."
Erich Jucker was born in March 1912 in Čadca, a small town in western Slovakia. He is of a Jewish family. After finishing the fifth class of the Orlová Grammar School, he become a chemist. In the late Thirties, he emigrated to the Polish Lvov. He left “at the last moment”. His parents and sisters died in the Treblinka concentration camp. Following the German-Soviet division of Poland in the Autumn of 1939, Lvov fell into Russian hands. Jucker was sentenced to 8 years of forced labour for “unauthorised residence in USSR territory”. He was saved from the Siberian gulag after two and a half years, thanks to the general amnesty for Czechoslovak emigrants. After being prompted to join the newly forming Czechoslovak army in Buzuluku, he decided to write to the Czechoslovak mission in Kujbyšev (current day Samara). Soon after he received a telegram from general Píka, telling him to come to Buzuluku. On the 14th of February, 1942 he was made a non-commissioned officer with the rank of corporal. He was assigned to the Third Company. In Buzuluku he became Staff Sergeant for officers in reserve. It is there he started his fighting career. During World War II he took part in the Battle of Sokolovo and followed through Kiev, Záškov, Bila Tserkva and Dukla to Prague. He was awarded the Czechoslovak War Cross three times in 1939, and he received the medal For Bravery twice, and was given other honours and medals. At the end of the war his rank was First Lieutenant. He ended his military career. He was demobilised in 1947, working in a knife factory and a pharmacist’s laboratory. Later he became a professional driver, remaining faithful to the profession until his retirement.
