Antonín Šulák

“He was a great guy. He had his brother there, and his dad was also in the army. There were two brothers with their father, they were also Volhynians. He was a great chap, and his misfortune was in his complying precisely with all the military and combat orders. He carried them out as he had been told …I was riding behind him, he was in the first squad. We rode on the left wing, heading toward the town of Zory. And his rookie driver bemired the tank in mud. In other words, they got stuck in a muddy part of a meadow. The driver should have ridden sideways, but he made a mistake and got stuck. He (Tůma – auth.) jumped out and said that he would guide us. I told him: ´That’s nonsense, if you go, they kill you, you cannot walk. You cannot go there on foot.´ And he found the courage to walk. He had to, for the military orders were telling him so. So he led us, and we got to the left side of the town. There was a road in front of us, some farm on the left-hand side, and there was a small pond. And I saw that I would have to ride that way. Unfortunately, I did not consider the terrain properly, the ground was soft, and I got stuck. And in this combat, mortar shells were flying all around us, and one of them hit our wood. We carried this wood with us, thick wooden desks, about twelve to fourteen centimeters, which we used for pulling the tanks out if they got stuck. So I sent my radio operator and a loader to go and bring the missing piece of wood back. They really did and we began preparations for pulling the tank out of mud. You placed the wooden planks under the track, tied it firmly, there were loops in the tank tracks for attaching the strings. So I switched to reverse gear, moved 2,5 meters back twice, and we were out of it. At that moment the squad commander Tůma was with us. He stepped away from the tank…maybe 5 meters, certainly not more. And the whistle of mortar shells started again. The Germans had seen us struggling with the mud, so they sent some greetings our way. Tůma stepped a bit further….Instant death. A splinter in his head. Happy death, you could say…”

“I was wounded on the Polish side of the border during a combat action for which I volunteered. It was a call from the commander of our brigade, the staff captain Janek, who asked for volunteers. He wanted three tanks of volunteers for a combat action with the aim to break the front and get to the rear of the Germans and seize some crossroad there to prevent the German army vehicles from riding further on the roads. And during this action my tank got a blast. It was a full blast to the front section, fired from an anti-tank cannon. I was heavily wounded, and my loader as well. I jumped out. Only the radio operator, a young Slovak guy, Cvitkovský was his name, remained alive. I met him after the war, he was just leaving the army and had plans to continue his studies, so he told me a bit more about it. The tank burnt down completely, killing the commander who stayed inside, he was probably killed instantly. That commander’s name was second lieutenant Rubinstein. He was originally from Uzhhorod, or Mukachevo, I think from Uzhhorod, actually. And as I remember, by his original profession he was a theatre actor, as he had told us. It was very unfortunate. So only myself and the young radio operator Cvitkovský have survived.”

That was interesting. I was in Kharkov as a worker. We worked there for one company and lived near an airfield there. Our neighbours were German recon pilots. They flew on missions to the rear of the enemy and on the front to take reconnaissance photographs. They even brought back a little bear from some place in the Caucasus mountains. They kept it in the garden. We looked at them from the other side, and I have to say, we cooked our meals ourselves, the food we received was not bad, sometimes they even gave us meat. The company was taking care of us. From this point of view, it was great in Kharkov. But the beginnings were awfully difficult and hungry…in winter. This was the time of Stalingrad, freezing terribly…it was horrible. I had a dog there. I found some stray dog, which probably got lost on the front. Somehow I lured him to me, and took him home and gave him food. He began to like me, and got better. Then a certain captain pilot took the dog away from me, claiming that this was an army dog and did not belong to me. He took the dog away, but one day the dog came back, he escaped and so the captain did not want him anymore. The dog stayed with me in my room, and there were only two of us, me and a guy named Straka, he was also from Lanžhot. And suddenly we hear some knocking on the door. The dog began to bark furiously, and Straka called out: ´OK, come in.´ But he probably could not hear it, so I ordered the dog - I called him Lux – to sit down and be quiet, and I went to open the door. There was a German corporal from the anti-aircraft team. He was not a pilot, but the German anti-aircraft guys wore the same uniforms. They served at airports and did the servicing of cannons, ground equipment, and so on. I thought, what the hell he wants. And Straka said out loud in Czech: ´What does that idiot want?´ He was a corporal. And when he heard what Straka just said, he exclaimed: ´Blast it, guys, you are Czechs?´ – ´Sure we are. We are from Moravia, we are Moravians.´ ´Well, I’m not a Moravian, but I know Moravia pretty well. And do you know where I come from? You guys know where Jindřichův Hradec is?´- ´Hell, we sure know Jindřichův Hradec. Southern Bohemia, right?´ - ´Yeah, so I come from a place down there, just next to the borderline.´ His name was Vaněk. And this is where the borderline between us was…We always called him Good Soldier Schweik. Naturally, he spoke German, he came from a mixed marriage. Meaning his dad was a Czech and his mother was German. So they probably lived near the border, and stayed there after the border regions became occupied. Must have been somewhere near Bystřice, or so…So we became friends. There was a young woman who worked there as a servant, and he was flirting with her. He came to us because of her. (Interviewer: ´Was she a Russian?´) A. Š: She was Ukrainian. He made some plans with her, he wanted to run away, to defect. He did not tell us, we did not know. This Vaněk, whom I met as he came to our room as a corporal anti-aircraft gunner. He worked a light quick-firing anti-aircraft cannon, and he served on the same airfield where we worked. So this was how we met. And he kept coming to our place because of that Ukrainian girl. We knew him simply as Vaněk, but we did not know what a soldier he was. But the Germans demoted him. And then I met him in our army! He was a sergeant and I met him in the tank brigade. When I joined the tank brigade, he was in our army, and had the sergeant’s rank. There were many guys like that. In the so-called Sudetenland, the region which was taken over by the Germans, there lived many Czechs from mixed marriages, and those who did not relocate inland had to join the army, depending on their age, health, and so on. So we became friends with Vaněk, he was a god guy. He was a Good Soldier Schweik. He knew how to work, how to get intelligence, two times he went for a meeting with Germans. He would say: ´I got a talk with them.´ He donned his German uniform and went for a chat with them. And he always came back and as a bonus he would often bring something back with him, a chicken for example, or something like that. And the reports he was bringing back, in the army it was unimaginable that someone would be able to bring such reports from the German army as he did. And the staff greatly commended him on that. Janko and Tesařík had only good words for him. But Vaněk had the nature of soldier Schweik. While I was there, they demoted him two times or so, and they were awarding him his rank back again.”

“My name is Antonín Šulák and I was born in southern Moravia. Back then, it was the Břeclav district, later it changed to Hodonín district when Břeclav was taken over. This was where I spent my childhood and youth, till 1938, 1939, when we actually began losing our state. I was born in Lanžhot, on December12th 1921. I was one of five children, my father was a state railways official. Out of the five children there was one girl and four of us boys. So, as I said, I spent my childhood years in Lanžhot There, I completed the eight years of primary school, this was the elementary level and then the so-called civic school, a three-year old higher primary. After that I went to Břeclav for vocational training, the town of Břeclav was a district seat at that time. For three and a half years I was learning the workshop fitter and founder’s trade, but I could not complete my studies, because then came those fateful years of ´38 and ´39, when our country first lost the border regions and then the rest of the republic became occupied. At that time we did not go to school, because Břeclav was taken over by the Germans. So we were drafted into the Reich. I went to work in Linz. There were many of us who were sent there, about sixty young people from Lanžhot alone.”

“This happened when our tank got a blast. It was a full front blast. The tank burnt down and using one arm, I climbed out of it. The Germans were still shooting at me from that house on the side. I was lucky they did not hit me, and I ran behind the house. And I started thinking - I was bleeding, blood was flowing from my head and arm. I was terribly afraid because of my belly. I felt horrible pain in my stomach. But I was still lucky, there was one splinter which did hit me, and it severed the skin and diaphragm, but did not go any further. Perhaps it was blocked by my sweater. So on my way to the hospital I was carrying a splinter in my English sweater.”

“So I spent a certain period of time there. Then they charged me with sabotage, alleging that we, the Moravians, were doing things which might even be punishable by death penalty. For instance we would remove the little bombs from the large bomb-shells. The Germans had them ready for the following days to be dropped by bomber airplanes, which flew on bombing missions in Ukraine and on the front. So we would dismantle those little bomb parts, but they found out about it, and it was blamed on the Polish workers who worked there and it put them into trouble. Most of us somehow managed to get away with it, but not everybody, like me and one of my coworkers. We were trialed for this, and sentenced to two months. So we spent those two months in a prison in Kharkov. It looked like a concentration camp – no food, heavy work. It was in winter, in January. They worked us hard, but did not give us food – just water, bread and little of clear soup. So during these two months we lost one third of our body weight there. (Interviewer: What year was it?) Winter of 1942.”