Second Lieutenant (ret.) Vladimír Melnik

“We were walking through a forest, cepju, like they say in Russian, and since the Germans were everywhere, we were walking and all of a sudden the sergeant dropped down. He was our commander. And we passed through. The snipers were somewhere there. We could not see them. We passed and our commander fell dead. It was always a commander who got killed. This was the sergeant. He was a Rusyn from Carpathian Ruthenia. Then there was captain Chlubna. I remember that, he was also killed.”

“At that time they were hunting people for the Soviet army. People would not join, so they were simply hunting them, just like huntsmen do. Whenever they got hold of a young man, off he went to the army and to the front. Naturally, I did not want to go, and so I joined the Czech army instead.”

“The bombs started falling upon us. I had dug such a hole for myself. And when the bombs began falling, I took cover in this hole, and a bomb dropped on the edge of my trench, and the debris covered me and deafened me. That is what I remember. I had good friends there, like Krobinec, and others. They dug me out and they were pulling me through a ditch by a road, all the way to the rear to get away from the front line. I remember this, when I came to myself, their pulling me by my legs through that ditch. And the village they brought me to, there was a barn where they were gathering all who were sick or wounded. So I was lying there. I was bleeding from my ears and from my mouth. And I could not hear anything. They were shouting or what. There was an air raid, we were lying in that barn, and they were dropping bombs there. The artillery was shooting at the place, and I heard nothing. I simply did not hear anything. I thought: That’s it, I am a cripple for life now.”

“When we arrived there, we came into one house and inside there was still food, and all kinds of things. Then we learnt that the Germans had to clear the place before us. It was a village down in a valley, and the Germans were all around there in the forests, and just with the dawn, mines began raining on us. Then there was chaos. We had to retreat from there. And several guys from our unit have already lost their lives there.”