"They called me up. It was a small room with a table. Three young Russian officers were there. I entered and they asked me:´ Are you Czech? ´ I replied: ´No, I have come from Hungary.´ They nodded - Hungarian.´ I said: ´I’ve come from Carpathian Ruthenia, from Hungary.´ One of the officers said: ´And have you been Czech until 1939? ´ ´Yes, I was.´ ´And would you like to served the army now? ´ Imagine, he asked me to enter the army...I remembered our soldiers when they have been enrolled into the army. They wore green uniforms with beautiful belt on it...And now I was just standing there like this...I didn’t know if it was a dream or something. The very morning they were telling me to the right, to the left, or you’ll get fired. And now they’re asking me if I want to go to the army! I couldn’t make up my mind. I said: ´ But I can’t hold the gun.´ and he told me: ´Look, we have below forty degrees Celsius here now. I’m going to send you to Mid Asia, where is forty degrees hot right now, you’ll be treated there and then they will send you back here. ´So I said: ´And what kind of army is it? ´ I heard that there is the Czechoslovak army being established right now in Ural by Buzuluk."
"There used to be a store there. I was an exploiter. They gave me a tobacco store. There was some customer coming there who used to say: ´The communist took my house! ´ And I told him: ´That’s wrong, that’s all wrong.´ the next day he came again saying, ´ I worked for him and he didn’t even provide the food. Good for him that they took it away from him.´ So I said again: ´That’s wrong too.´ I respected everyone. I tried to stay on nobody’s side. Even today I’m staying on nobody’s side. I don’t even listen to the radio. I don’t wish to comment this. I have no opinion." ( He was commenting what he can say about the fall down of the ´iron curtain´ in November of 1989 - author’s note.)
"The wide Dnepr River runs through Kiev town. The Russian troops hurried along the river toward Kiev. You could float on the river only by using the boat. They used to make fake fog, so the Germans couldn’t sink us. This way we made it to the neighborhood of Kiev. There we stayed for, I don’t remember - two or three weeks. A massive attack has been prepared in order to liberate Kiev town. When the day D came, general Svoboda came to us and told us: ´Boys, you’re just about to go to the battle. Fight like you are fighting for Prague, Brno, Bratislava or Uzhhorod. ´ it was when Uzhhorod town was still part of Carpathian. The Russians sent us as the main attack. We were...our Czechoslovak army was the first one in Kiev, the capital of Ukraine. We got there at night. There were only few citizens, but they all welcomed us."
"When I came to apply for an apartment they told me to bring them my CV. So I wrote there that I have spent three years in Siberia. They told me:´ Look fellow, you can’t write there that you have been in the forced labor camp.´ ´But you told me to write down the truth! What am I supposed to put there then?!´ ´Write there that you have been working in friendly country.´ So at the end I wrote there that I have worked in friendly country instead of being there for punishment."
"All of a sudden we noticed there is a German armored transport coming from the left and it began to fire at us. Not particularly on us, because they couldn’t see us for we were hiding in grass, but they fired on the infantry troop behind us. So me and my friend decided, that I will go to the cannon. We set up the distance for 400 meters. My friend was supposed to stay behind and check how far our mines go. I crawled toward the wood. When I was about 30 meters away from the wood I thought: ´OK, I’ll get up now and run to the wood.´ but as I got up one mine fell right in front of me and created a huge hole. I thought: ´The next mine won’t fall in here.´ so I jumped over the hole and heard the second mine landed behind me. I said: ´Careful now.´ the third mine exploded next to me. And it ripped my arm off. It was just hanging there on the skin. And three shrapnel hit my back. I didn’t fell down though, I ran the last 10 meters to the wood, where our soldiers were already waiting. They jumped to me, grabbed my arm - I didn’t know, that I lost my arm - they grabbed my arm, but it was just hanging there and it started to turn black already."
(question) “If you were to say what you liked about the developments after 1989, what would you say was right and what was wrong?”
“What‘s right is that I can… my grandchildren and everyone can go abroad, they don‘t need any papers, and now I might go again to, well I‘m not sure, to visit our native land. So I‘ll go as well, it‘s possible to go just with a whatsit, a passport, right. So that changed. That‘s real freedom that changed, that you can go where you want. That changed a lot.”
(question) “And what‘s bad? What did we do wrong?”
“Now what we did wrong was that some get eight hundred crowns pension, or they get a ten, twenty thousand crown salary, and some get a hundred thousand or however much. And they get millions in bonuses, now that‘s a thing that isn‘t right, right. Some people go around, and just buying vegetables they count every crown, while others fly around in aeroplanes and all that stuff, so that‘s not right.”
"I’m standing by a tree, I lay down. About three meters away from me some soldier was lying. He begged me: ´Please shoot me, I’m dying, don’t let me suffer here.´ But I told him: ´Wait a minute, they’ll help us, they will save us.´ He yelled at me again from the left side: ´Give me your gun, please.´ I replied: ´I don’t have any gun, we have to wait for our boys to come to collect us.´ I saw the ambulance man walking around:´ What ´s going to happen with us, when we get out of here?´ He said: ´Look, this is a meadow we walked through, this meadow is open from all sides. You can’t even go with a car here...they would hear the roaring of the engines and would start to fire. We need to wait for the dark. There is a horse wagon and we will put you on it and then we’ll take you away.´ Those were the longest minutes...just imagine, you’re thirsty, bleeding...you can’t even talk how thirsty you are, you can’t do anything, the minutes were endless, it was really awful experience to wait for the dark. When it got dark, they loaded the two most badly hurt on the bottom and the five of us sat everywhere we could. They brought us to the temporary medical tent - it was in the middle of Dukla - it was a large tent. Inside there were benches made out of wooden boards covered with sheets. By the entrance there was a tiny hall with lights on and some hay on the ground. The nurses came to us and gave us each 50 grams of some medical. It was something like the pre-op check up. They did everything what is usually done as the pre-op examination...so they gave us each 50 grams. She saw my arm being black already and said: ´When were you wounded? ´ I answered: ´The sun was still shining when it happened, I don’t know when.´ and it was night now."
“When I ran up, one shell fell in front of me, nothing, a second fell behind me, nothing again, but the third fell a bit to the side of me, I had binoculars and a sub-machine gun. It tore my arm off. The sub and the binoculars fell to the ground, I didn’t fall, I gazed at the medic from the wood. He rushed up to me, bandaged my arm so I wouldn’t bleed to death, and I thought to myself: ‘Dear God, I’ve gone through the whole front, Siberia, and now so close to the Czechoslovak borders... I won’t even come home, I won’t go anywhere.’ But I knew that I would live with one arm, so I knelt with my left arm to a thick tree to protect me. And I protected it with my body from the other side. I put my head under the tree, so the shrapnel would stop the pain, because I was thirsty, in pain... Then the medic rushed up to me and took me a bit further away. A man was screaming from a bush nearby, he turned to me: ‘Friend, shoot me, I’m heavily injured.’ I replied: ‘I’m heavily injured as well, we have to wait.’ I saw hand rise up on the left, and I heard: ‘Lend me your pistol, or shoot me.’ I say it like that to the medic as well, what’ll happen to us. He then told us that there’s a horse and cart here from our surgery in Dukla, but we have to wait until dusk because the meadow was under fire and there was no other way out. That was the meadow where the dead were. Thirst, pain, and now you’re supposed to wait until evening. Something awful. So then we came to the surgery at Dukla. I knelt on my left arm to protect it, and a nurse went by from the other side, giving everyone a bit of vodka. She saw my arm was all black, she asked me when I had been wounded, and she also gave me a bit of vodka. I fell asleep in a wink. The medic pushed me up to the surgery, and when they took me there, they were sawing up two blokes before me with a saw. I thought they were sawing planks, but they were sawing one of our soldier’s legs off above the knee.”
"When I was still a small boy, some old legionnaire was in our village and he used to say: ´The best death is to freeze to death. You just fall asleep and never wake up again.´ and then when I went to work the other day, with my feet swollen, everything frosted, and I couldn’t take anything off of me, not even my boots. I went there, but I wasn’t able to work, because I wasn’t able to do anything anymore. Just imagine, I remember - I got so sleepy all of a sudden, so I remembered this old man and thought that this is it, I’m going to die now. So I got up and began to walk around. It was already 45 Celsius degrees and we only work up to 43 degrees. When the temperatures got higher than 43 they came and wrote a record that it is not possible to work, that we can’t do anything..."
Full recordings
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Vojenská nemocnice odd Péče o vojenské veterány, 01.07.2009
Mr. Vasil Korol was born on December 15th, 1922 in the village of Volové in Carpathian Ruthenia. He had four younger siblings. His parents both worked on a farm that they owned. The family avowed the Greek Catholic faith. Mr. Vasil Korol attended only grammar school - he was first taught in Ukrainian and later in Czech. In October of 1939, he decided to escape the Hungarians and run away to the USSR. Unfortunately, he was caught and sentenced to three years in prison for illegally crossing the border. He worked on the railway construction leading to the town of Vorkuta in very tough conditions. He was released in 1943 and he then entered the Czechoslovak army. His very first combat experience was by Kiev where he fought as an artillerymen. Later he fought in the town of Ruda, Bílá Cerkev, Žaškov or Ostrožany etc. He eventually became an artillery commander. During the Dukla Pass battle, he suffered an injury to the arm and had his arm amputated. He first underwent medical treatment at the hospital for war veterans near Moscow and later at the Tatranská Lomnica hospital (in Slovakia) and Poděbrady hospital. After the war, he was promoted to the ENS honor. For a short period of time, he worked as the military buildings service engineer. In 1949, he has confirmed as a disabled veteran. The government provided him with a tobacco store, but in 1950 the store was taken by communists. He then worked as the head of a tobacco shop in Prague-Smíchov until he retired. He was married and had two children. He lived in the war veteran home located at the Central Military Hospital in Prague. He was an active member of the Association of Legionnaires. Mr. Vasil Korol died on February 14th, 2015.
