Anna Kostovičová
* 1922 †︎ 2013
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"It was full of lice and bedbugs. They used to crawl on the walls during the night. If you got bit by these you had large blisters. So we didn’t sleep much during the night. We went outside and sat on the bench. Here was the fence and there was the guardhouse. There were another four towers with the guards watching us."
"Did the Soviets treat you like prisoners?"
"Yes, just like prisoners. Later they also installed barbed wires all over. Some people who couldn’t stand it there anymore, thought about jumping over the wires and escaping. But the wires were under an electric stream so people were actually killed if they touched it. No one could go anywhere. Sometimes they took us to town for the questioning - mostly at nights. They brought us into a room where an officer sat with his gun aimed at us."
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"It was awful. All people had lice. There was nowhere to wash our clothes. What people wore during the day, they also slept in during the night. That’s why they all had lice. Besides that there were fleas and bedbugs all over the camp, so people couldn’t sleep well. They just sat outside in the backyard. In the morning they brought us boiling water and told us it was the tea. They also brought rock hard lumps of sugar and sixty decagrams of bread - for the whole day! For lunch we had some mash and then there was the soup for dinner. That was all our meal."
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"As our train approached Kiev, two German aircrafts attacked us at 10:00pm. There was a lieutenant in one wagon, where small anti-tank guns were stored. These aircrafts started to fire, but this lieutenant refused let the people out of the train. Another aircraft came by and dropped a bomb on that wagon. Fifty-four people died there and fifty four were wounded."
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"We all lived there happily in peace. When the Hungarians came later and started to collect the Jews and putting them on trucks, we all were crying. We used to visit each other. They were our neighbors; we knew them all. On Saturdays - their Shabbat holiday - they were not allowed to make any fire. When we were still kids we used to go to help them in the kitchen on Saturdays. They always gave us some treats or something. Living with them was fine. But then the Hungarians came...and the Germans came. Apart from that, the Czechoslovak army came in 1939 too. I have a picture here of drivers who used to come to buy cigarettes from us. Some John from Moravia even fell in love with me. He always brought some tea and lemon...They just sat with us, drinking their tea. We talked together. This Johnny boy made a picture of me and my sister with him. He told me that he has a farmstead in Moravia and that he would take me with him there. But it never happened. They had to leave after the Hungarians came. But he sent letters to me."
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"I changed my shoes and put on two pairs of dresses and in this way I crossed the border. We were on the road for three days and three nights. When we got closer to the border line, where we were supposed to cross one path that the Hungarian soldiers were guarding. We saw one shepherd grazing his sheep so one of our boys came to him and asked him how we could cross the border to Poland. He told him: ´You know, there are two men at the guard station. They swap at night though; they go to the village and then at 4:00am another two guards come to the border line. So you could cross the border in between.´ So that’s how we did it. This shepherd fed us, gave us some tea, we gave him some Hungarian money that we had, and then in the early morning we headed to the border. It wasn’t far, but up-hill all the way. As we reached the border, the two Hungarian soldiers were already there and started to fire at us. We ran to the woods so they couldn’t trace where we are. We kept running further and further and still heard them shooting..."
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Celé nahrávky
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Byt Anny Kostovičové, 27.03.2010
(audio)
délka: 01:15:04
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.
Kyiv was a nightmare - the trees along the road were full of hanged people.
Mrs. Anna Kostovičová comes from Carpathian Ruthenia, from a town called Svalava. She spent her youth there; worked on the family field and helped her father at his tobacco store. After the occupation of her native Ruthenia by the Hungarian army, she decided to leave and crossed the border to the Soviet-occupied part of Poland. The group with which she crossed the border was unfortunately detained by the Red Army and were subsequently arrested. After a long incarceration, Mrs. Kostovičová was ultimately sentenced to three years in a forced labor camp in Siberia for illegal crossing of the border. In Siberia she had to work on forest harvesting. She was released from the gulag early, however. Then she worked for a short time in agriculture and then she entered voluntarily into a Czechoslovak army troop in Buzuluk in the spring of 1943. After she underwent radiology training she was assigned to Anti-aircraft guns. With these troops she participated in battles near Kyiv and also near Bila Tserkva in Ukraine. She passed away on February, the 23rd, 2013.