“Our camp was liberated by a Red tank army under Rybalko on 23 April 1945. The unit that liberated us, well, the way it is on the front, they were lacking numbers. So they took us young boys into the army. It was voluntary, so about eighty of us went. They gave us uniforms, four days of training, they showed us how to use a sub-machine gun and a grenade, and they put us in with the tank brigade as paratroopers [sic].”
“When we were still in Potsdam, in the camp, in forty-two, the massive air raids started from the West. They flew over Potsdam, over our camp, to Berlin. They bombed Berlin. We always watched. And then at the end, about a month before the Ruskies were to come, they bombed Potsdam. They blew the camp to smithereens, there were bombs everywhere, unexploded ones - many did explode, but many didn’t. But we survived. They chucked them all around, mostly into the woods because the camp was by the forest. Their mission was to destroy the industry, the train station in Potsdam. Well, the whole place was in ruins.”
“In the meantime I kept applying for them to let me move. They refused twice, the military didn’t want to let me go. I even married there, I wedded my wife, she was half Czech. Her mother was Czech and her father was Ukrainian. In fifty-five, with my application, when I applied again to be allowed to go here, they only gave me a three-month leave. We came to have a look what it’s like here. We wanted to stay, but they didn’t allow it, the Russian embassy, so we had to go back again, in fifty-six. It wasn’t until four years later that they processed our request and we could move here for good. In 1960.”
Vladislav Rejsa was born on 1 May 1926 into a Czech family in Volhynia in the former Soviet Union. After the Nazi occupation of Volhynia he was assigned to forced labour in Germany, where he spent three years in a labour camp in abysmal conditions. When he was liberated by the Red Army he joined a tank brigade and took part in the war. He served in the army for five years. In 1947 his family remigrated to Czechoslovakia. After he was discharged from the army he worked as a primary school teacher. After repeated requests he was finally allowed to remigrate to Czechoslovakia in 1960. As of 2017 he lived Chodov. Vladislav Rejsa passed away on August, the 11th, 2024.
