“In my life, a biblical truth has been verified, that man rules over another to his own hurt.”
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Olga Lugertová, nee Budová, was born in 1925 in Hulč at Volyhnia, where her grandparents moved to from Bohemia. Her parents were farmers. She attended Polish school until the division of Poland and annexation of Volyhnia by the Bolsheviks in 1939. Two years later, Germans occupied the area, who, according to Ms. Lugertová, didn’t treat Czechs particulary badly there. On the contrary they protected civilians against raids and murders by Bandera’s Ukrainian nationalists. Immediately after the re-occupation of Volyhnia by the Russians in 1944, a forced recruitment to the Soviet army took place. Olga Lugertová was taken to Kyiv where she underwent a six-month medical training. It focused on teaching the participants the principles of surgery so that they could work as medics at the front. At the beginning of 1945, she and three other Czechs were moved to a field hospital in Malá Polana, Slovakia. Then Ms. Lugertová followed the advancing units through Slovakia. She has the worst memories of the combat by Liptovský Mikuláš, where there were so many wounded that they had nowhere to put them. The end of the war reached her on Czech territory, where she had never been before. She got as far as to Theresienstadt and subsequently, she began to serve as a dentist in Litoměřice. Her parents followed her to Bohemia.
