"We had the first combat after leaving Krosno. We left when the offensive was launched. It was in the afternoon. Our battalion was going through Krosno. We were going very slowly without the lights. In the morning we got to Machnówka. The infantry stopped. The Germans were in the forest. So we turned back and left for Machnówka."
"People believed the Germans - they hoped they would free us from the Russians. But the Ukrainians did not believe them, saying the regimes are the same. And then everybody found it out."
"There were some air raids in Rovno but it was not so bad. But when we were going from Dubno to Luck, some planes attacked us before Zdolbunov. Fortunately, it was at night so they dropped the bombs somewhere else and did not hit the train. Our train was changing the place - sometimes it moved forward and then backward.
"There was a valley behind Machnówka and then there was a forest. The Germans were in the forest. We lost a lot of soldiers and the infantry was so devastated that we had to withdraw and go back to Machnówke where we defended ourselves. We had been keeping the line since 3 o´clock. When it got dark, we had to lay down communication cables. So we were putting the cable down but before we got to the place where we should have got, we were ordered to go back. So we returned to Machnówka and our battalion left for another village."
Antonín Vaník was born in Dorohostaje in Polish part of Volhynia in 1926. When he was seventeen, he joined the Czech Army Corps in Russia. He participated in building a training camp in Bukovina and he also fought in the Battle of the Dukla Pass and in Slovakia. After the war he changed place several times together with his troops; he was in Blažim, which was part of Žatec military group. After the demobilisation he was given a farm in Lubník u Lanškrouna. He joined a cooperative in 1950 and became an agronomist. However, he left the cooperative in 1953 and then he ran his farm on a private basis. In 1960 he was forced to join the cooperative again. Antonín Vaník died on November 8, 2020.
