Staff Sergeant (ret.) Helena Křikavová

“I didn´t have any contact with my home at all. I got to know that my father was murdered. My brothers were no longer alive. We hoped that my parents would come to meet us, I only had my Mum and Grandma left, but they came only in 1947 in those such wagons for cattle. So we welcomed them in Žatec in spring of 1947.”

“In September before Dukla I got to know that in August my father, Josef Albrecht, and my uncles, Jirásek and Havlíček, were murdered by Bandera-men. Alive they poked out their eyes and cut out their tongues. They threw them all still alive into a well, where they had thrown a barbed wire before. It was a shock for me that my father ended up like this.”

“We in Volynia had Lidice too – it was the village of Malín. Now we are going to celebrate the sixtieth anniversary. I am not going there. The descendants of the Bandera-men are still alive and I have burnt bridges already. The Germans were pinning even small children to their bayonets and throwing them into the fire – to the burning schools and barns. A friend of mine jumped out of the window and the Germans shot him into his leg. All who were trying to escape they were finishing off afterwards, but he pretended to be dead. They called even: ´Er ist tot.´”

“It was terrible where everywhere we were hiding around Dukla. The injured, the hospitals… Everything was horrible. We were supposed to cross over the Carpathians. We were supposed to cross Dukla in about two weeks, but we had been stuck there for about two months before we got out of all the mud. It was terrible.”