Iva Valdmanová

"We came to a village, for example, where we wanted to check a house. We were always ordered to take precautions before entering, so that we would not be killed by a grenade. When the owners of the houses left the barracks, soldiers came there and loaded various traps. The grenades were on the handle, in bed, in the oven, under the threshold. That's why we first threw stones and sticks into the house to activate any explosive traps. It often happened that everything flew into the air. The best thing was when there were a lot of animals that checked the area by walking through it. That's why we often went to the houses where there were a lot of animals. For example, once we came to a barracks where a cow was lying in a double bed. It lay there. Or a sow with piglets ran out of the house."

"Every day there was a big meeting at the camp about what was going on outside, what we found out. And we were constantly talking about the corpses that were damaged, and it was not known why. Since I had an agricultural school and I know that a pig is an omnivore and a hen too, so I raised my hand during one session and said that I thought the dead bodies were eaten by animals. My colleagues thought that the people were tortured because they had bitten noses, ears, fingers. This opinion of mine was somehow verified, and then it was written into the report that they were not tortured victims, but that the damage to the bodies was caused by animals that ran there abandoned."