Žofie Machničová

“When my husband arrived to Czechia, he married for the first time and had to children with his wife. She came from Theresienstadt. I was his second wife, this was our life.” — “You said he also came from Carpathia Ruthenia.” — “Yes, he came from Lutova, Ljuta. This is in Vysoke Berezne district. There are no roads, it was the region from which they crossed to Russia. My husband was an office, he took his boys when it was necessary to defend Czechoslovakia, he took twenty-seven boys and went to Russia across mountains and forests. Stalin imprisoned them and many of them died. When they were returning, half of them had been gone already.”

“Thank God we survived everything. Today young boys would no longer go to sacrifice their lives for their country?” — “How did your husband respond to the return of the Russians in 1968, what was his experience?” — “He came to talk to them, asked them to be reasonable, he told them that he had been in the war, how many people had died etc. Then they spoke and left. He knew what war was.”