“SS divisions. [They were destroying everything?] They were firing at everything, at everything that was in front of them and behind them. They left burnt fields behind them. [Did they kill somebody from the village as well?] Some people managed to hide. Some villagers had made a kind of cellars, and six people would hide in one such cellar, for example, but [a German soldier] would throw in a few grenades and walk away. This was the German division.”
“We were attacking. There were three houses and they [Germans] had a machine gun nest there. We thus had to eliminate it, and as we were dashing toward them, they were shooting at us like crazy. Our guys were dropping to the ground, and there were many of them who got killed or wounded. I jumped into a deep trench and I wanted to dash forward again, but at that moment I got hit by a shrapnel right here.”
“[Our unit] got sent to the village Wrocanka, and the first column to the village Machnówka. The Germans launched a counter-offensive on the following day, but the third brigade went there and as they were marching there, they were singing, and they were scolded and reprimanded that this was not how one should march to the front.”
“For some time we served in the defence behind the town of Lutsk, because the Soviets who were conducting the Jassy–Kishinev operation in Romania at that time needed reinforcements. We returned there only on May 2. On May 1, we still marched in a parade in Kiverce, and then we went back there, and on the second day we loaded everything and we were transported there to the Romanian border.”
“I got along [with Germans from my home] very well. She [the old lady] like me; she would say that I was substituting her own son for her. There were two of them, father with his son, and the son could speak Czech. He had served in the unit of ’35ers in Pilsen, and then he was somewhere – I don’t know where – somewhere in France, in Yugoslavia, and in Russia with Hitler’s army.”
Lieutenant in retirement Václav Kocek was born January 5, 1924 in the village Palče in Volhynia in the then Poland. He comes from the community of Volhynian Czechs who had come to the area of western Ukraine in the second half of the 19th century. As a young man, Václav experienced the Polish rule in Volhynia, which was succeeded by the Soviet regime after September 17, 1939 and then by the Nazi Germany from June 22, 1944. As the Red Army was reclaiming “their” territory after the wehrmacht had failed to advance in the Soviet Union, fighting occurred directly in the village Palče and nearly half of the village was destroyed. Václav applied to join the newly formed 1st Czechoslovak army corps on March 23, 1944 after the liberation of Volhynia. He was assigned to the future 1st tank and submachine gun brigade and he served in the motorized submachine gun battalion of submachine gunners under the command of Antonín Sochor. He took part in the Carpathian-Dukla operation, in which he was wounded on September 12, 1944. From September 20, 1944 until the beginning of 1945 he was receiving treatment in a Soviet field hospital and then near Jaroslawl in Poland. When he recovered he joined the Soviet replacement regiment and shortly after he went to Humenné in Slovakia, where he was sent to a guard unit. When the war ended, he settled in the village Buková near Horšovský Týn. He worked as an independent farmer and subsequently he became an employee of the Unified Agricultural Cooperative. Václav lived in Buková until the end of his life. He died on June 19, 2014.
