Jiří Kovtan

“At that time I was already a corporal. Svoboda pointed at me, and I replied: ´But General, I’m wounded, too.´ He was about to leave, but I told him: ´Give me a car and a driver, I will carry stuff to Dukla and bringing back the wounded.´”

“Our guys were already in Magadan, and we continued to stay there (in Susuman) with a few others because we had gotten higher sentences. And so I wrote a letter to Magadan, to the NKVD leader Drapkin, saying that we were Czechoslovak citizens as well and that we also wanted to join the Czechoslovak army. An order came immediately and we were transferred to Magadan to join the others. The ten of us were so emaciated that we weighted forty-five or fifty kilos, whereas before we had had eighty kilos, just like I have today.”

“One day I found a nugget of gold, that was about two hundred grams. I received a kilo of bread for it, ten grams of vodka, and a ponchik, a kind of pasta. And I didn’t have to work for two days.”

“In front of Bila Cerekev there is a village called Rudá. It was already autumn, 1943. It was cloudy and very foggy, and we were about to attack that village. As we look arounded, we noticed that there were German soldiers among us. So we started stabbing them with bayonets and shooting them, they were shouting, and then we marched on.”