Ivan Major

“When we were retreating from Sokolovo, Bedřich, a deputy commandant of our squad, told me: ´You will ride this horse, because the cartman is now at the staff headquarters and there is nobody to lead this horse!´ I replied: ´But I don’t know how to work the horses!´ But there was a mortar we needed to pull away. The others began to retreat. And I looked and saw that the Germans were now hardly hundred meters behind me! So I took the horse and quickly followed our soldiers. I met them in a village; our squad was already there. On the way there, I passed by a Jewish man who was running and begging: ´Take me with you!´ I shouted to him to get on the wagon. Then we gave a ride to another soldier, the telephone operator Hájek, he always carried two of those big telephone drums with him. When we reached the village, there was a stack of hay, and Hájek got off and headed towards that stack. I told him: ´Hájek, you got to ride with us! Look, the Germans are now right behind us! And he replied that he just cannot help it, and he was already unbuttoning his trousers and running towards that stack. I wondered at it, but the Germans with their tanks had already reached the village. We had to ride on. And I have never seen him again. I don’t know what happended to him.”

“I will tell you one episode; it took place before Kiev. The armies were assembling here, the Soviets, our Czechoslovak soldiers.... all awaiting the attack on Kiev. Suddenly a Soviet soldier comes to us and brings us a leg of meat and asks: ´Boys, would you like some meat?´ We thought, well, why not. So we took it and after a little while when we had to move the mortars to another place, we found out one of our horses was missing. And so we realized where this meat came from...”

“We agreed upon it on Sunday, and on Monday morning we left the house and rode about fifty kilometers by bus. Then we had to pass through deep forests and over the hills that are in that region. And eventually we crossed the border with the Soviet Union. We had not made any special preparation for this, we simply left one day. Nor did we need anyone to lead us over the border, there was a well-trodden path leading to the border. We followed this path and then we saw a border stone – on one side it said USSR, and on the other Czechoslovak Republic.”

“What about your life after the war? Did you stay in the army?” “We were happy that the war was over. We looked forward to starting a new life. A life in peace. We were glad that the Germans had been defeated. However I cannot say that something would be different today, that there would be peace. Pray God that the nations would finally agree they would live without wars and struggle and misery.”

“Three kilometres behind the border we were sighted by a Russian patrol, by three officers. They fired the rifle. We had to get down on the ground. Three others came and they took us to some other place. We were interrogated. They locked us in a room and there we waited for a trial. There were several more interrogation session and then were sentenced in Starobělsk. Each of us got a three year penalty. I spent this time in several prisons – the both the district ones and the larger ones, like Stanislav for example.”