“Now I’d like to know something about the Jews from Volhynia. With the Germans taking hold of Volhynia they must have had a hard time. Maybe they had already had a hard time under the Russians, but with the coming of the Germans, it must have gotten much worse. How do you recall these times? Did you witness any cruelties or any anti-Jewish measures?”
“They herded them into camps. They took all of their possessions, everything of any value. They could redeem themselves if they had enough money. I remember once me and my father, we went to the city on our cart because we needed to buy something, and we saw a truck full of Jews that were taken away from one of the camps. They had to lie on the floor and were guarded by armed Ukrainians who were so-called “Schutzman”. These were special Ukrainian police units created by the Germans to ensure law and order. They took these Jews out of Luck to a village called Hnidava. There they had to dig huge pits – their own graves. They stripped them from their clothes, lined them up in front of the pits and shot them en masse. They fell down into the pits and then their executors buried them. I didn’t see this personally but I heard stories about it. I also heard that sometimes some of the Jews weren’t killed by the shot, that they were only wounded. They were, however, buried with the dead and the people of this village, Hnidava, then noticed that the earth above the mass graves was still moving even two or three days after the graves had been filled up.”
“Did the local people from the village try to help these Jews out of the grave, when they saw that the earth was moving?”
“No one was allowed to go there. They had this place guarded. They could walk nearby these graves as there were a lot of paths in the forests used by the local people to get to their fields. So they transported them out of town and murdered them in cold blood in the adjacent forests.”
“In 1941, after Luck had been bombed, the Germans herded the Soviet soldiers who became prisoners of war (POW) to the city to clear the debris. It was terrible because the POWs were in a miserable condition – undernourished, half naked etc. Sometimes, someone from the people that came to Luck to buy things at the local market place threw these poor souls a cabbage or a loaf of bread. But this was risky as it could have been qualified as helping the enemy… (So the Germans were trying to clean the town up, contrary to the Russians, but were using undernourished Russian POWs for it?). No they didn’t feed them and they din’t give them proper clothes…”
“Were there some German measures in your village during the German occupation, before the Soviets returned?”
“Well in 1943 there was this hatred between the Poles and the Ukrainians. The Ukrainian nationalists exterminated the Polish settlers living farther away from the city.”
“Could you describe what kind of people these Polish settlers were?”
“They were farmers, they either inherited some landed property or the bought it.”
“I’ve heard that they were some sort of former Polish officers or legionaries or something of the sort and that they were given some preferential estates.”
“Well, I don’t know for sure but they got some estates, I think they were some higher officers or some landlords.”
“So these were the people that the gangs of Ukrainian nationalists were killing?”
“Yes, they were wiping them out.”
“What was happening there in particular? How did it work?”
“Well, they had to flee to Luck from their estates because the Ukrainians came in the night to murder them. They went back during the day to get their things or to harvest the yield from the fields. But they weren’t allowed to stay there in the night, because if they did and the Ukrainians caught them, they would kill them remorselessly. They would throw them into the wells or, or stifle them, or burn them alive or do other terrible things to them. The Polish landlords were accompanied by German soldiers to protect them from Ukrainian attacks. They got this support from the Germans because of the grain they harvested. That grain was used for the German army, so it was advantageous for the Germans to protect them. This collaboration with the Germans only further infuriated the Ukrainians, who therefore slaughtered them even more. So it turned into a deadly vicious circle of mutual killing.”
“The Ukrainians probably sought an ethnic cleansing of the area because they counted on it becoming part of the Ukraine some day.”
“The Germans in the beginning promised them an independent Ukraine and when it became apparent that this is not going to materialize, they started to form these gangs and went after the Germans.”
“Do you know of some instances when the Ukrainian nationalists harmed some Czechs in Lipiny?”
“Nothing happened in Lipiny, the nationalists only killed some Hokš. They took him out of his house to show them the direction. When he came out they shot him. No one knows why they did this.”
“They also shot one captive at the well at Charles’ place, on the estate of the Štěpánek family. He was wounded in the leg and arm, so he crawled to the well because he was thirsty and the Germans encountered him so the shot him. They ordered Charles to load him on a wheel-barrow and take him away from the courtyard.”
“You say he was a captive but he actually wasn’t a captive, it was just a wounded soldier. The Germans saw him as he was crawling to the well and shot him. Tell me why did your house get in the line of fire? The Russians were attacking the Germans from the field and your house was in between?”
“The Russians appeared from the forest. They came from the forest to the field and attacked the Germans. We later learned from some of the wounded Russian soldiers that their leaders told them they were making an attack on Berlin! The Russian commanders sacrificed their men – it was a slaughter. So many Russian soldiers fell in this fight, they were cannon fodder for the Germans. You can’t imagine how many dead Russian soldiers there were. Me and my uncle we were searching the place for bodies after the fights had ended. At Charles’ place there was a strawberry flower-bed. At this bed we found 23 dead Russian soldiers. It was such a mess! There were piles of corpses, dead horses, weapons, ammunition, grenades, military machinery etc. The grain was thrashed. About ten days later they hurled in the Jews from the Luck camps to clean this mess up. It was high summer then and the weather was very hot. The corpses were inflated and bursting. They dug huge mass graves and threw all the corpses inside.”
“These Germans were marching on that path when the Russians opened fire at them. A German armored car came down the road to the mills, approaching the Germans. The German soldiers jumped on the car and fired rockets – I saw how they fired three red rockets. A fight broke out. Behind our house, there was the Soviet line, soldiers were sticking out their heads from the grain. The first line was at the mansion of the Štěpánek family, at Charles’ place, behind the barn and the sties. When the shooting started we were in the line of fire. The Germans came in the armored vehicle and in a tank right in front of our house. We narrowly made it to the shelter in the basement of our house. A fierce fight raged outside. They burned down everything – the livestock, the sties and the barn. Only the house stood intact. After the fire died down, around one o’clock in the afternoon, grandmother said: “Praised be the lord, at least our house is still standing”. As soon as she finished the sentence, the German tank fired at the roof of our house. Soon the whole house was on fire. We had to pad the door to the basement with wet sacks in order not to suffocate in the basement. So that’s how we experienced the German invasion. Every time the gun fire would die down, we ran out and tried to extinguish the fire. When the shooting began again, we hid in the basement and this would go on forever. We only managed to save the first floor of our house.”
“My biggest hobby was music. It helped me in social life as well as in friendship…Although it was hard for me because we had a lot of performances, maybe thousands, it is wonderful to recall it.”
Josef Kozák was born on August 23, 1929, in the village of Lipiny nearby the town of Luck in Volhynia. The village was populated by roughly 400 inhabitants of Czech extraction. He grew up in the family of Antonín Kozák, a private miller who had built his own engine-driven flour mill. In 1939 he witnessed the Soviet occupation, the looting and the confiscation of his father‘s property. In the beginning of the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, the Kozák family was woken up by the German shelling of Luck. Later they became direct eyewitnesses of combat operations of the German army that took place around their estate in Lipiny. Their estate was burned down in the course of the battle. At the age of sixteen, Josef Kozák voluntarily enrolled for the army in order not to have to join a unit assigned for the pursuit of Ukrainian nationalists‘ troops (the so-called „Banderovci“). In 1945 he left on a transport to Czechoslovakia where he settled in the Moravian town of Jistebník. In 1956 he married Emílie Zajíčková and had two daughters with her - Dana and Hana. In 1959 after the confiscation of the estate by Communists he moved with his parents to Litoměřice. He worked in various leading positions in the food-stuff and agriculture sectors. His life-long hobby has been music. In 1991 he got divorced and he now lives with his girlfriend in Žitenice. Josef Kozák died on December, the 27th, 2016 in Litoměřice.
