"I was sent to a certain location because there were supposedly German troops there. We came to that place and we saw the Germans about fifty meters away, even wearing these caps with these visors. They opened fire at us from a machine gun. One young boy from our troop stayed there. He was killed on the spot and the two of us were wounded. I didn’t notice anything at first; I didn’t feel any pain at all. And suddenly I looked down - it was in February – and I saw blood pouring out of my boot. I had a towel and so I wrapped it around my leg and tightened it. Then I walked for three and a half kilometers. I ran to our troops and they loaded me on the horses and drove me to the bunker to a field hospital. It was underneath the ground, in a dugout. A huge dugout. There were 27 patients there. When the Germans and the Ustashi were retreating, they were marching over the top of the bunker and they didn’t notice the entrance. It was all very well covered, even the vents which were located in the roots of the trees. There was one guerrilla with a grenade and a machine gun and if the Germans had discovered our hideout, he was ready to blow the place up. We were all in agreement with this as it was much worse to get into the hands of the Germans than to die such a death.”
“When they established the resistance committee in Rastovac the Ustashi troops came to town. The father was with the partisans, the son a member of the Ustashi. They came and took the father together with one secretary of the resistance organization. They tied them to a cart and dragged them away. Their names were Karič and Levar. Or another story. Those who were deployed in Germany to forced labor came back for vacation and they would help with the harvest at home. Three from our village were killed by the Germans. Just because they went to help the Serbs to harvest in the neighboring Orthodox village. For that they killed them, dumped their bodies in a barn and set the barn on fire. Three people from our village.”
“My sister was then still a child. She was grazing cows when a group of the Vlasov paramilitary troops - as they were called – emerged from the forest and placed land mines around the railroad tracks. The kids took the cows to the pastures and one cow stepped on the mine and exploded. My little sister's leg was torn up, the flesh was ripped out.”
Vincent Laš was born in 1927 in the village Skalitá, which lies in the northeastern part of Slovakia near the border with Poland. He spent a large part of his childhood in the village of Mali Rastovac in Slavonia, where his family moved in 1936 during the economic crisis. During the war – at the age of merely sixteen years – Vincent Laš joined the Communist partisans led by Josip Broz Tito in Slavonia. By the end of the war, he was wounded in the leg in a firefight with the Germans and had to be treated for some time in a field hospital located in an underground forest dugout, before being transferred to a hospital in Pančava. In 1946, the whole family re-emigrated back to Czechoslovakia and settled in a small village called Nová Lublice near Opava, where the witness lives until today. Vincent Laš died on 27 June 2018.
