"There (at the Dukla) they beat us like grass. Because they were up there and we were down there, and we weren't ready to fight, and they were waiting for us and beating us down. There was joy and there was sadness, because a lot of friends fell there. - That's when we were always given a shot of vodka, every day, and the girls didn't drink, so we had it in a tea bottle, one for ten girls , and we had a treat and sang and that was it."
"There were Russian border guards walking on their side, they saw us and picked us up. They took us and we didn't know where to, until they put us in the camp, which was already full of them. Even the girls and boys we knew from the villages we were from, so we met there together. The conditions were terrible. Six hundred grams of bread and a pint of soup a day. It was a kind of unfinished shed, and everyone who found a place there slept on the floor."
"That was us in court and they found out why we came, that we were no rich people or no scholars or no God knows what - well young girls of seventeen. Well, they gave us three years, and that we would go to Siberia to work. And when they sentenced us, we were still in jail for a month, and then they took us all away. We went there by train. And we went through four more prisons. And from Kharkov they took us, we went by cattle train to Karaganda for fourteen days. How many times we drove all night and how many times we stood for twenty-four hours on the spot. - Eat? We were given a piece of bread and a bucket of soup, so we had to share."
We went to the Soviet Union like we went to the sea
Sixteen-year-old Vasilina Lyakhova later Mesarova from the files of the State Archive of the Transcarpathian Region
photo: State Archive of Transcarpathian Region/USTR
photo: State Archive of Transcarpathian Region/USTR
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Vasilina Mesárová (née Lyakhova) was born on 12 July 1922 in a poor family in the village of Volové in Subcarpathian Rus. Together with seven other young people, she decided to leave Hungarian-occupied Subcarpathian Rus in 1940 to work in the Soviet Union. After crossing the border, they were all arrested and sentenced to three years in camps in Siberia. After the Soviet Union was invaded by Nazi Germany, the witness was released and subsequently enlisted in the Czechoslovak troops on May 15, 1943. She underwent full military training and a medical course and provided aid to the wounded as a member of the medical unit in the brigade pharmacy. She experienced hardest battles at Dukla. After the end of the war she demobilized in Slany. Until 1960 she lived in Dolní Žandov near Mariánské Lázně, later in Prague, where she worked in poultry factories.
