Captain Jaroslav Sitar

“They gathered Jews from the entire region together. Then our people from Budky and the surrounding areas had to dig a hole in the forest. The Nazis stuffed the Jews into a grain silo and then they brought them to the forest in a truck. The Jews then had to undress completely next to that hole, but their things down on the ground next to them, and then the Nazis shot them one after the other. I went there to see it but it had already been covered over. Horrible… And their behavior when they were taking even those little kids to that silo, my uncle lived across from it. I caught a glimpse of it while it was going on. They were hitting those children in the head with their batons, the kids were so terrified they didn’t even cry, it was already, simply, beyond the threshold of the tolerable.”

“It was the Stalinist regime. For example, my father had thirty-eight bee colonies. It was his hobby. He built them with his own hands. And all the hives and everything that went with it. The hives were arranged around the yard. Simply, Dad was able to take care of the whole operation himself. It cost him a terrible amount of effort. But as soon as the Stalinist regime came, Dad gave all of it away to the neighboring villages for free. Completely for free. Why? Because as soon as the Stalinist regime would come and you had, let’s say, bees, it immediately arranged for a quota of delivered goods. Not filling those quotas meant Siberia and getting locked up.”

“It didn’t concern only Germans… We saw the pogroms of Jews and we also saw how they treated the war prisoners, the Soviet war prisoners to be precise, which was an experience that is also impossible to describe. Those people were dying on the streets, they were starving human wrecks. The Germans forced them to work but they died already on the street because they were in such a miserable condition. It is something you can’t explain to today’s people. The Soviets in turn deported the Polish legionaries to Siberia. Their country was under a dictatorship. They treated the Polish as enemies, because they established the independent state in 1918 in the area which had before been under the rule of Prussia, Austria and Russia. So they were understood as enemies of the state.”

“During the Polish rule I was normally attending school. Life was normal, same as in a democratic state. We had a band for children which was conducted by a native, Mr. Židlický who studied at a conservatory in Prague and I played in that band. Life was normal until the beginning of the war when Poland was taken over by Germany. Hitler occupied a large part of Poland and the Russian army entered western Ukraine and Belarus. I was attending a Soviet ten-grade school and the lessons were in Ukrainian. In 1941 when the Soviet Union was attacked by Germany, the school was open for some time but after that, the only option was to enter the Ukrainian grammar school in Luck, where I studied for a year. Then even this school was closed and there was no other opportunity to study. It is hard to describe what life was like to today’s people. It was something modern people can hardly imagine.”

“The only connection was through the phone. That meant to lay a cable. There were no pair lines, only a single line. Then the telephone was connected to earth. So there was a telephonic connection between the company and the battalion and between the battalion and the brigade. So the connection had to be maintained at any cost. It was the only means of communication we had. The artillery also had transmitters. But those were not like the ones today, a transmitter consisted of two heavy boxes and it had a reach of twenty kilometers, thirty maximum. The equipment was not as advanced at the time. Communication was crucial for keeping the frontline positions and also a key to success. Of course that every now and then the line was disconnected, torn. Then we had to follow the line no matter if it was a day or night and connect the disconnected ends. That meant danger of passing through a landmine field or being attacked by a German patrol. Because sometimes they disconnected the line in the night and were waiting for you to come. There was also the problem of finding the other end of the wire. We were supposed to do it in pairs so that one would hold the line and the other would look for the other end. But I had to do it alone because there weren’t enough men. You could also use flares to give a signal but the radio and the telephone were the only means of communication. And the higher instances used the Morse code, that was suitable for longer distances and they also had trained staff.”

“I was sent to lay a cable to Hyrowa hora. That was near Dukla. I reached the hill and I thought that there will be our troops. And then I saw a group of Germans, very close, right behind me. We were equipped to lay the cables and we had only a short rifle. I couldn’t do much with that, so I decided to dig a little trench and hide until they leave. And just a few minutes later Steiner appeared with his company. I don’t know how he got there, but suddenly there he was. Steiner was decorated with seven war crosses, The White Lion order and so on. So that was a salvation I will never forget.”

“It snowed and rained during the day and it was freezing in the night. And we were in the trenches. When we dug a trench on the hill, it was full of water. I wondered why. So we were standing in the water and the water froze in our boots. The first few months we were only in the trenches, because you couldn’t find any suitable place to sleep at the frontline. You had to bear it. And can’t even imagine how much a man can bare. You can imagine what snow with rain does when you are normally dressed. And we had to be in the open for a week, all of this time soaked with water. Maybe we were a little more resistant to the cold. For a whole year I didn’t sleep in a house to get a proper sleep. I don’t remember anyone having flu or cold. The conditions didn’t seem to be favorable for illnesses. Like anybody else, what I feared the most was an injury. Because any injury that can nowadays be cured quite easily could kill a man before he got to the hospital. You were there in the dirt and mud and the field hospital was more than a kilometer away. So you already had gangrene before you got there and died because of infection.”

“During the war, there were over seven hundred Jews gathered in our town. And they were all executed. That was in 1942. Under the Polish rule we lived side by side without any tensions. I went to school with the Polish, the Ukrainians and the Jews and nobody cared about national or ethnic origins. There were 42 000 Czechs but also 150 000 Germans living in Volhynia. We were also in contact with them and there were no racial tensions before the war. When the war began, the problem of nationality arose. Before that, you distinguished good and bad people and nationality didn’t play any part. But when I saw my schoolmates being executed… One could imagine how they must have felt. It is something you can’t explain to anyone and there is no analogy for that. To kill someone just on the account of his nationality.”