Bohuslav Kovalčuk

“Well, I was a twenty-year old village lad with no inclination to the army but I joined the Czechoslovak army enthusiastically. We all joined the army with great enthusiasm. We could, of course, have joined the Soviet army instead, but nobody would do that. We all joined the Czechoslovak army. We knew that Stalin and Beneš had agreed that after the war the Germans would be driven out and that we would be repatriated to Czechoslovakia. Whole families, all the 45.000 people would be repatriated to Czechoslovakia. So that’s what we were looking forward to when we were entering the army. Well, I was a twenty-year old, but you have to consider that also the forty-year olds or even fifty-year olds with families and children at home were rushing into the army enthusiastically. No one was thinking about the battles to come but about coming to Czechoslovakia after the war.”

“My first assignment to the battlefield was in Dukla on 8 September 1944. They stationed us close to the battle line. I think it was somewhere close to Krosno. At Dukla, I got into combat for the first time. It was a terrible experience. Before the whole operation started, General Koněv conferred with his commanders and told them: ‘Look, we have to help the Slovaks with their uprising. There’s no other way to get to Slovakia than through the Dukla Pass. Therefore we have to take that pass as quickly as possible. It is approximately 100 kilometers from Krosno to Prešov. I suggest we move by about 20 kilometers a day. In this way we could be in Prešov in five days’. But the whole operation was poorly prepared because no one had counted with the Slovak uprising. Therefore, there were no reinforcements available in time for the operation, no lookouts had been set up, the terrain had not been explored and the rear of the army group had not been developed and supplied well. We were practically going into battle with our eyes blind folded. The Soviets thought that we’d simply storm the German positions and sweep the pass. Brute-force tactics were something the Soviet commanders had always excelled at. They thought they could take the German positions in the pass by force. But they were completely wrong. On the first day of battle, we marched in the morning towards the German positions. It was after a rainy night and there was a morning mist that mercifully hid us from the German eye. But then, all of a sudden, the mist disappeared, the sun came out and our cover was gone. The Germans had us served on a plate and started to shell us with their mortars. It was a carnage. They shot our ranks to pieces and dispersed our brigade completely. We were totally demoralized after this bloodbath. Our general staff was accommodated in a former school building but they were ready to retreat any minute. I was instructed by the general-staff signalmen to go to the army rear where the petrol stockpiles were located. They gave me a twenty-liter petrol can and told me to get petrol for their car. I set out and the first thing I saw on the way was a dead coachman and horses lying scattered on the road. I then went by a farmhouse that was full with grenades, ammunition and our soldiers. I told them to give me something to drink as I was totally thirsty. I think that I had fever on that terrible first day. So I drank and told them that I would stop by on the way back. After I walked away a few hundred meters a German mortar grenade hit that building and there followed a series of uninterrupted explosions that left me scared to death. So these first days at Dukla were awful for us. We suffered terrible losses in men. The Germans were well prepared, they had reinforced their positions, they had set up lookouts in the mountains and their fire was very accurate. They could hit whatever they wanted. They were simply superior to us. Naturally, it took much longer to get to Prešov then five days. In the end, it was whole three months. The battle started on September the 8th, I was there since September the 9th and we crossed the Czechoslovak border on October the 6th. We didn’t get to Prešov till after Christmas. It was sometime in January.”

“The thing with the Russian Jews is that they didn’t put them into concentration camps as they did with the Jews from the rest of Europe, they simply shot them at the spot. For example in Luck, where we lived, there were three Jewish families. What happened is that they put them all together in a farmhouse. They ‘concentrated’ them, so to speak. It worked pretty much the same all around Russia, not just where we lived. They concentrated the local Jewish families from the Luck area in such ‘small concentration camps’. These camps were not of the same sort like the big concentration camps where they put the Jews from the Protectorate, like Theresienstadt or Auschwitz. These were just provisional camps. Sometimes, somebody managed to escape and these Jews were then hiding somewhere in the area, mostly some relatives or friends would have them at their place. My mom once found a Jewish girl hiding in a hay pile, so she fed her and we kept her at our place for some time. The Germans would dig holes at the outskirts of the town or somewhere in the forests, bring the Jews in Lorries, shoot them and bury them in the mass graves. My wife is from Luck and her dad once saw the killing of Jews by Germans as he passed by. They had to get undressed and then they got shot and thrown into the pits. So that’s how it worked in Russia. They didn’t kill them in concentration camps but shot them locally. That’s how most of the Jews that didn’t manage to flee with the Red Army died.”

“I was stationed at the general staff headquarters and had some friends who were sappers. Their task was to clear minefields or to set charges, lay mines and the like. When they had nothing to do they were waiting for the next orders at the headquarters. Sometimes, they would also bring food to the soldiers who fought in the first battle line. One of them, Vláďa, told me that they’re going to the front to bring the soldiers food. After about two hours, they came back. He called my name and I came out and saw that one of his hands was missing. It didn’t impress me at all and I just said: ‘Thank God it didn’t blow off your head”! Or another time, I saw our radio operator being hit by a nearby explosion. His charred back was riddled with shrapnel splinters. You get to see so many corpses in war that you don’t even notice. After a while, it doesn’t affect you anymore. Another situation I remember is when I was sitting on a small armored transporter which drove across a creek which was receiving heavy bombardment from the Germans. The creek and surrounding area was littered with dead bodies as that place was very hard to reach and for now, while the shelling was still going on, they just left the corpses there to be recovered later. I remember that the transporter just drove over the corpses crushing them underneath it and that it didn’t do anything to me. I got used to such things and it didn’t affect me anymore. I totally understand the soldiers in the first lines of attack who don’t care too much about being hit when they are storming an enemy position. You get so hardened in war that you don’t have any feelings anymore.”