“I was evacuated and I helped to evacuate also my Mum and her children. We went to Gorkij. There all the young people spontaneously offered blood, because there was really a lot of those injured in the front line. We helped to build hospitals. When we were evacuated, it was summer so we left without any warm cloths. But then autumn came and we realized that we could not live there because we did not have anything to wear. And that is why my mother decided that we would go to a warm region, to Aschabad. We went by steamboat and Svetka, my mothers´ youngest daughter, became ill, and so we had to get off in Kujbyshev. And we stayed there. There were very hard conditions there, it is hard to say. We had a small room rented together with another evacuated family. I had an aunt who had no children and who often took me for the summer holidays. She was evacuated in Buzuluk. So I went to see her and I met there my first and last love, my husband.”
“I had a foot number 36 and I got shoes number 40. There were no smaller. We had warm socks, they were made by English women. They must have been great. They were making woollen socks, shirts, also coats, and pure wool was keeping us warm. Cotton-wool coats, boys had them, and high felt boots, who had high felt boots, he was king in winter.”
“I for instance exchanged one horse with a Russian for two litres of vodka. My husband got vodka as an officer, but he did not drink. We got it anyway as a medication, especially in autumn. And once I met a Russian who had a horse, and I said: “It is a nice horse, I would like to have it.” And he: “You will give me vodka, I will give you the horse.” So we did business and I had a horse for two litres of vodka. It was an excellent horse, but then they took it from me, as is said it was too good for me. I got then a little Zajčik. He was short, but he was trusty. He was surely trustier than anybody else. We went once from the headquarters. Zajčik was short, the ditches were taken by longer horses. I rode as the last one, they jumped, the ditch was quite wide, and I do not know until now how my short Zajčik managed it, but believe me, I thought I was in the air force. That I was flying from somewhere to somewhere. Then I stroked him, kissed him and I gave him the last sugar I ever received.”
“With my husband we got married in Buzuluk. Because I was a foreigner, according to the state law I had to ask for permission. Also an officer of the Czechoslovak army could not marry just like that, he had to ask for permission too. They had a commission which allowed it, and further it was sent through the military attaché to London where they had to permit the marriage too. Everything in the Czechoslovak army was according the laws of the Republic. The officer had to be at least 28 years old, I had to make a deposit of 20 thousand, but fortunately they pardoned this as they knew that we did not have so much money. After about seven months the permission arrived and we could get married.”
“Our tasks as signalmen were various. We made connections, were in the centrals… depending on the situation. If we were moving or on one place. Our commander was Grete, I do not remember exactly her surname. And she was an excellent woman. If you had a perfect commander, the better was life.”
“I had to ask after the marriage to be allowed to join the army. The permission arrived. I had a shorter training in Buzuluk, and before I became his wife the whole of our year had had training for traffic policeman. After a smaller training I got to the paratrooper brigade. During the training I fell to my back unpleasantly and for the rest of my life I had problems with it. Then Colonel Kratochvíl came to us from England, already commander of the corps, and he decided that women with husbands should join the units closer to them. We were about fourteen or fifteen and they transported us behind Kiev.”
“I kept fearing for my husband. Once there was a startle that he was killed. I thought I would go mad. In Dukla we even as a couple allowed us to conceive our son. On the 28th October the enemy let us in peace by chance, so we made a celebration in our dugout. I went then through the rest of the front as pregnant. And until today the army owes me, they did not give me even one day of maternity leave. So when they were giving me a medal for serving in the army for six months, which was given to Volynians and Slovaks, I said that my son should have received it too. He was there for seven months.”
“When the Germans assaulted us, we were having a graduation party. We were walking around the city, singing, we were happy that we had the exams behind us, but at four in the morning the Germans started to bomb us. I wanted to go to a flying academy, but I was very little, I weighed only 42 kg. So they told me that they could not accept such a figure.”
“We girls who were there were just a few and there were hundreds boys around us. Can you imagine what a problem it was when we needed to go for instance to the toilet? Or we had various things… We were in the knees, in the rear, in the fight, actually it was our eternal problem.”
“With food it varied. When we were moving, it was all different, sometimes even bad, and when we were staying on one place, the chefs cooked for us, we got it to the mess tin. We ate everything. Most often we ate dumplings, some sauce, soup. In Dukla it was a disaster. Maybe for three months we had mutton. And until now, when I hear mutton, I feel bad.”
Mrs. Maja Dočkalová was born on March 27, 1924 near Zhytomyr, Ukraine. Her father worked in the army. On the day she was celebrating her successful passing of a school exit exam, the Germans attacked the Soviet Union, forcing Maja and her family to evacuate. They moved from Lviv, where they were living at that time, to Gorkij and then Kujbyshev. Later she decided to leave her family and move in with an aunt in Buzuluk. There, she met an officer of the Czechoslovak Army Corps, Jaroslav Dočkal. She married him and joined the army too. She went through paratrooper and signalman training, and became a signalman. During the war Mrs Dočkalová also worked as a translator and contact man on hourse. After the war she lived with her husband in Czechoslovakia and devoted herself to her children, sometimes she organized various cultural events and translated. Maja Dočkalová died in December 2013.
