"The Germans caught him but he somehow managed to escape. They also whipped him and tried to destroy him. But as he was running away, he stepped on an anti-tank mine and the explosion tore away his foot and wrecked the other foot as well. In effect, he ended up completely disabled for the rest of his life. He had such a quilted blanket with him. I asked him why he always had it with him. He said that he would cover himself with that jacket. I told him he should in the first place save his life and not some blanket. He must have seen some real value in that blanket and ended up that badly. So I later saw him being disabled in both lower limbs."
"We agreed to split up our duty. He would take a nap and I would be on guard and then we'd change. So I was on guard for more than 6 hours straight and it was time to wake up my buddy and get a rest for myself as well. I found him asleep, lying in the water – half of his body was in the water. So I pulled him out of the water and we dried his clothes. I told him to sit down somewhere and rest because he wasn't fit for duty. I would take his duty instead. He said: 'you're right, I fell asleep and that water has drained me of all my energy'."
"I once reported to president Beneš. He said: 'good, good, thank you'. Then he was about to leave – he already made a few of steps walking away from me – but he stopped and came back to me. He told me: 'Sergeant, you're not a local Czech, right'? And I told him: 'No, Mr. President, I'm a Czech from Volhynia'. It's written somewhere here. He told me: 'They're all going to get here'. And he was right. I think this was on June the 6th, or something like that – I don't remember the exact date anymore. After a while, they issued a decree saying that they're all going to get here. And they all moved to Czechoslovakia."
"He told me I was supposed to go and see my boss at the headquarters. You should have seen our headquarters. It was located in a shack because we couldn't expose it too much to the eye of the enemy. The sky was full of airplanes – theirs as well as ours – and they would get a chance of taking some photographs of it. And of course the radio station as well. The Germans had an advantage over us in that they could localize us and then shell us. So my commander always told me to stay away from the headquarters a bit."
"It was easy. When somebody dropped out, he was automatically replaced by someone else and we went on. We were a collective of some three, four people. There were other things we had to have with us and report to our superiors. One of us had to sit at it for instance and we corresponded just the way you would speak into a telephone today. We didn't use the Morse code [Alexandr Všetečka knocks with his knuckles on the table in order to indicate the Morse code alphabet – note by the author]. There was no Morse code. That would have been much worse because the people were mostly ignorant of the distinction between the Morse code and direct speech. Not everybody knew it."
First lieutenant in retirement Alexandr Všetečka was born on March 25, 1927, in the village of Jadvipol in Volhynia in what then used to be Poland. His father was a butcher who owned a farmstead. Alexandr Všetečka lived through the Soviet (1939-1941) as well as the German (1941-1944) occupation of Volhynia. On May 5, 1944, he joined the newly constituted 1st Czechoslovak army corps in Rovno. After a stay in a replacement unit in Kamianets-Podilskyi, he was trained in Bessarabia and attended an officer cadet school. He was assigned to the 3rd brigade and served in the 4th battalion as a radiotelegraph operator. He took part in the combat in the Dukla pass in the Carpathian Mountains and the following fighting in Slovakia. He kept his uniform even after the war when he became a member of the guard of president Beneš at the Prague Castle. Later, he settled in Žatec and was employed in a purchase department and in a screw factory. Mr. Alexandr Všetečka lived in Žatec until his sudden death on February 27, 2013.
