Vladimír Souček

“The Jews were the first ones to be persecuted – they were moved to one room, men and women alike. The women stayed home and the men went to work on the field next to the railroad. They had to dig huge pits. While digging, they were ordered to sing. When they finished the work, they took the Jewish men and women, lined them up in front of the pits and shot them. They threw the little kids into the pits alive. They burned an awful lot of Jewish villages in the Ukraine. It was more than 300 villages. They did the same thing to the Jewish villages what they did to Lidice and Ležáky in Czechoslovakia.”

“After I passed the entrance examination, I was accepted. It was in the Žitomír region where you had to have a passport. Just like we have ID cards here, you had to carry a passport then. I went to see the chairman of our committee that administered three Bohemian villages – Okolek, Ivanoviče and Krušinec. It was one national Bohemian community. I needed a receipt from him to get my new passport. He was a hardened Communist. He told me: ‘You have to work in the Kolkhoz. We need you here, not at the university! We need you at the Kolkhoz’. You know, of course I felt very sorry for it.”

“In Germany, when we were crossing the Oder River, the bridges had been torn down and we couldn’t cross. We had to construct a pontoon bridge and crossed over it. We saw our Russian soldiers retreating only with their horses – and the little canons, the forty-fivers and seventy-sixes, had been left behind. Everybody was retreating. Our battery crossed the pontoon bridge, deployed the cannons and waited. We didn’t have enough ammunition because the supplies hadn’t arrived, yet. We were left with about four shells per gun. The Germans rushed forth against us with fourteen tanks and artillery vehicles. The commander of the regiment ordered us to let them come closer and shoot to kill. It was like a miracle – after almost every shot, one German tank burst into flames. I grabbed a machine gun and opened fire at the German soldiers on the tanks. Therefore, I was afterwards decorated by the regimental commander with the Order of the Patriotic War.”

“I couldn’t protest, but when I worked there as an economist I was surrounded by the chairman of the district committee, the chief of the NKVD, and the president of the court. They all became my friends. They took me as a fair guy. I wasn’t against the government but I wasn’t enjoying it either. You know, you had to carry out the orders. I helped a lot of people that were sentenced.”