Jaroslav Pokrupa

“My name is Pokrupa Jaroslav. I was born on May 20th 1926 in Kupychiv at Volhynia. I don’t know what it looked like during the Polish rule but we had all the local offices run by state. It was a kind of a departmental center. We had schools, a police office and all important institutions. There were churches, - Catholic, Orthodox, Evangelic and a synagogue as well. There were only three pure Czech streets and there were a few Ukrainians living in one of them. And the Czechs who didn’t live in Kupychiv bought land in the surrounding villages which also belonged to the town. That was where I went to school. It was a Polish school. When I was in the sixth grade, Russians came and they began to teach us in Ukrainian. I repeated the sixth grade and I finished my studies with the seventh grade… Then the Germans came, but I had my school already finished. My father wanted me to as much education as I could when I was young. So he enrolled me to a school in Kovel. That was something like a capital for the area. It was on the main train line to Russia, so it was all guarded. I attended the school for half a year and then the Germans closed all the schools. And when the Germans had already been at Stalingrad and they were on retreat. At the time we listened to a crystal radio which was prohibited during the war and we heard on the radio that there was a certain general Svoboda who was putting together a Czechoslovak army. And as the Germans retreated and the frontline approached us, as they were already in Lutsk, which was the capital of Volhynia, us the Volhynian Czechs wrote a letter to general Svoboda that we wanted to enter the army.”

“Germans and Ukrainians – that was when the Ukrainians were still at the Schutzpolizei – killed 730 Jews from our town and the surrounding villages. We had several shops in the town and those were mostly owned by the Jews. Before, there were no hostilities between the Czechs and the Jews, there really wasn’t any problem. I never met with an eye witness to the massacre but people said that. Some people saw it when they arrested them and took them to be executed. Then they sent people to cover the dead bodies which were left at the sand mine. That is indisputable.”

“With the German army, they weren’t present so much in the area because it was a bit aside. They were for example at Kovel, because there they had to watch the railroad to Russia. But even though it was under German control, Ukrainian partisan units were formed. They were commanded by Štěpán Bandera so they called them Bandera fighters. The Russian and Polish partisans were also active in the area, it was called armija krajowa. So there were more fighting units like this. We were always neutral, we couldn’t get involved into anything. What could we do? We had to be silent and try to save our lives. Once there was a meeting with the Banderas and they wanted us to join them and to fight both against the Russians and the Germans, but our elders refused to, that we won’t interfere. We found that three times they surrounded the village and they wanted to burn the village and kill us all, but they never managed. I have it written somewhere. For the first time, there were only few of them, so we fought them off. Our people began to buy guns to defend themselves. The Germans had built 60 bunkers around the village to harvest the fields. They kept an eye on that. They took the harvest and left. And we were guarding in the bunkers and protecting the village before the Banderas. And we managed to fight them back. When they were almost in the village one of our men mounted a horse and rode to the woods where Polish partisans had a camp. So he went to tell them. They heard the shooting which lasted all day, so they were already coming. So they met in the middle of the way and so he told them. Polish partisans – armija krajova. In our village, the first three houses were Czech. So they went there and they asked where the worst fights were, and when they found out, they went there and you should have heard the rattle.”

“We were serving as radio operators at the 1st artillery regiment. We stopped breathing. There were none of our forces in front of us. That was the confusion before Machnowka. Lieutenant Rosenzweig ordered us to mount the truck and we jumped up as fast as we never did before. Then we hurried down. He sat next to the driver and we went back to Machnowka. The driver went so fast that we were all covered with cold sweat and when we came to the village, there was a Russian general waving his gun and shouting. “Zanimajtě oboronu!” (Prepare to the defense position!). As soon as he said that, a mortar fire began. I was sitting on the truck and it knocked me down into the ditch. And then it all began snapping, that was the first welcome. We were there under fire for the whole day. About 600 people died. Bohumil Bartoš who was a colonel at the first mortar battery lost his leg there. He was there in a garden when they blasted him. We were the first artillery regiment and we were in advance of the infantry. That was the confusion, it should have been the other way round. We stayed in Machnowka until three o’clock in the morning then we got the order to retreat, so we did.”