First Lieutenant (ret.) Alexandr Všetečka

"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'."

"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."

"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."