"Dukla was something terrible. Such a young… He was from Volyn… It was Russia, Ukraine, everything was mixed. And a nice boy like that, I gave him tea with a teaspoon. 'Nurse, I don't want to die.' I said, 'No, drink tea.' And a while after that, he just pressed my hand and he was dead. That's how it went, from one room to another. We all experienced a lot of sorrow there at Dukla."
"So, we went to [Svoboda's] army, to the front. We came to the front. So we came to the front, they divided us there according to health assessments. I was a liaison officer. They just divided us all. And then I was injured and I came back, not to the liaison office, but as a nurse, I did the cleaning, it was awful how it went there."
"I was in Novosibirsk. And I got to the factory, sewing shirts, jackets and pants for the army. I had a good machine, I sewed really well. And there was a guy. And there was a pretty woman with me. And the machine broke down, I cried, and I went to the steel plant and begged in Russian that my machine had broken down. And she came, tapped me like that, smiled, 'It'll be fine.' And in three days they gave us freedom. Such a dream! And they set us free."
Žofie Popovičová was born on November 30, 1923 in Bukovec. In 1940, without the knowledge of their parents, she and her seven years older sister Anna and several friends crossed the border with the Soviet Union. They were detained after a short distance from the border and sent to Siberia after a court classifying them as Hungarian spies. Žofie and Anna were imprisoned in Novosibirsk for three years. In 1943, they were released and joined the first Czechoslovak regiment of Svoboda’s army. Žofie underwent a short military training and became a liaison officer. After an injury caused by the explosion of a tank bomb, she retreated and had undergone the Dukla’s operation as a nurse. She got married after the war and ran a restaurant with her husband. Their daughter was born. However, Ivan Popovič, Žofie’s husband, died tragically and Žofie, a war invalid, was left alone. In 1951, the Communists confiscated their pub. She met Fedor Fosor, who was convicted of high treason and for whom she was also monitored and questioned by the State Security. When he was released after five years of prison, they lived together in Dolní Dunajovice for another forty years. Žofie Popovičová died in 2019.
