“So we set out across the fields to the village at midnight, the snow up to our knees. When we entered the village, we suddenly came under fire from the Germans. The horses turned on the road and started [running - ed.] back to the forest. They kept shooting at us - it was probably just a patrol because they only had incendiary bullets. We only saw little lights. And we rode into the forest, so no one was hurt, there were no injuries, nothing. I don’t know, I didn’t [pay attention - ed.] to where we went afterwards. Brest-Litovsk was surrounded by swamps, that was terrible.”
“I attended school, I was in my seventh year, and the war came in forty-one. I had everything [ready - ed.], I was to send it to the teacher at the school, that I was to apply there, but I never got in. None of us did. And we left [the country - trans.] in forty-seven, we remigrated to Bohemia.”
“[The Ukrainians - ed.] lay on the ground and refused to work, so they didn’t have [anything to eat - ed.]. And partisans came and hid somewhere up in the forests leading to Pransko. They had little dugouts in the ground, and they took everything they stole from the Germans - horses, cows, pigs - into the woods. It was like a city, but underground. Back then I was also [ready - ed.] to go and have a look there, but it never happened. They were there, and my brother-in-law [was with them - ed.]. The men were all partisans.”
One time we entered a village with horses and sleighs, recon hadn’t found anything, and when we entered the village, they started shooting at us
Olga Mauleová
photo: Dobová: Svatební fotografie; Současná: 7.3.2017, autor Stanislav Pítr, ČSOL
photo: Dobová: Svatební fotografie; Současná: 7.3.2017, autor Stanislav Pítr, ČSOL
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Olga Mauleová, née Kamínková, was born on 19 October 1925 in the village of Jedvaniny in Khmelnytskyi Oblast in Soviet Ukraine. Her parents worked at a kolkhoz, and the witness also had two sisters and a brother. She attended two years of Czech school and five years of Ukrainian and Russian school, but her plans for further education were marred by Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941. During the war, Jedvaniny lay in the vicinity of deep forests, which provided ample shelter for partisans, and so the Kamíneks soon got in touch with the anti-Nazi resistance. Olga Mauleová first met the Soviet partisans of Sidora Kovpaka on 12 February 1943 - she acted as a messenger and scout for them. From 10 March 1943 she worked with the partisans of the Mikhailov-Odukha group, and from 3 January 1944 she served in the Zarodina-Šiška troop. With the last mentioned she took part in the liberation of Ostrog, Lutsk, Volodomyr-Volynski, and Kovel, and came all the way to Brest-Litovsk (now Brest in Belarus), where she and other partisans crossed the German-Russian front. The Red Army liberated West Ukraine in early 1944, and so Olga Mauleová could return to her native Jedvaniny. In 1947 she and her family remigrated to Czechoslovakia and settled down in Kladruby near Stříbro. She worked in a textile plant in Stříbro until she and her husband moved to Terezín, where she worked at a costume jewellery shop. After her retirement she moved to Kladno. She died on November 3rd, 2020.
