“While in Suzdala we were guarded by NKVD soldiers. Our guys got hold of pumpkins somewhere and they carved eyes in them and placed candles inside. They threw a white sheet over themselves and they went to scare these Soviet soldiers. And they really got scared; they were not allowed to shoot and now they saw something like that creeping towards them. So while there, we were doing stupid things like that, too.”
“In autumn (in Buzuluk) when we ran out of weapons, there was a conflict between Svoboda and Píka concerning the combat on the front. The Ministry in London believed that we ought to take part in combat only symbolically by making an appearance there, and not to engage in the fighting on the front. Svoboda and we, the soldiers, wanted exactly the opposite – for that was what we were there for. That’s where the letter to Stalin asking his permission to enter the front came from.”
“While in Suzdala, we had various lectures by political officers from the sovchoz. It was interesting that when the war began, all these political officers were telling us that a German worker would never fight against the Soviet people. They were still claiming this even at the time when the Germans were in Smolensk – it was a kind of propaganda.”
“When we didn’t manage to cross the river Mže because the thaw set in and the tanks would not be able to cross it, the battalion was ordered to retreat. One of my memories relates to that: as the individual units were withdrawing one by one, first lieutenant Zhor and I were standing at the edge of the forest, and when all of them passed, there was absolute silence. It was a horrible feeling to be completely alone. Since Kudlič was already dead, first lieutenant Zhor was ordered to command the 2nd column at that time.”
“In Buzuluk, women applied to join the army, too. They served mostly as nurses, and we thus had one team composed entirely of women. But the training was very demanding for them. At first none of us knew how to organize such training. They had been trained in a female unit, which had been organized by the infirmary, and after going through this course they had been assigned to the columns, with five or six women forming one team. They had gone through the same training as any other soldier, without any concessions, be it digging, marching, shooting, or guard duty. The team of women who were assigned to the mortar unit do not like to remember me, because when it was their turn to do the guard duty and it was freezing over forty degrees below zero, I never allowed them to avoid this duty.”
Václav Drnek was born in 1918 in České Budějovice. He completed his compulsory military service just before the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia. He decided to cross the Protectorate border and apply to join the Czechoslovak units in Poland. Although he applied for the Foreign Legion, he was eventually sent with others to the USSR, where he was interned in several camps. He spent most of his imprisonment in Suzdal, until the end of 1941. He took part in the fighting for Sokolovo, Kiev, and in the Dukla operation. He was a commander of a mortar unit, and eventually served as a staff commander of the artillery column.
