“So we worked as nurses. We didn’t assist with surgeries, but we were just there as nurses. One time some doctor arrived from England, and they called me up. I was on duty the whole night, my friends had gone to Volhynia. They’d been given leave. I went to lie down, and the doctor, he was some major I think, from the English [Czechoslovak] army, and he ordered me around: ‘What do you want, doctor?’ ‘Well, I want you to give injections.’ ‘But you said we won’t be giving injections, because we’ve only got the course.’ That I didn’t have any proper school. But we injected into veins, and we also gave injections at the sick bay. The doctors were satisfied with our work.”
“Some [wounded soldier] came rushing up right at us. I thought: That’s the one they operated on, and they didn’t give him enough narcotics. He woke up, and he screamed like anything. So they gave him some more narcotics and tied his head down. They way he was, he would’ve strangled us. We were running round the table like this to get away from him, so he couldn’t catch us. So we shouted, I said: ‘Come here, he’s going to kill us.’ And [meanwhile] they kept bringing in wounded [soldiers]. There were an awful lot of wounded there. We didn’t even know which to take in first. We just to the worst ones, those that were injured the most. And the others, which were just slightly, [we took those later]. So then they set off again [to the front-line combat].”
“One [German] was playing in this big hall. When we were leaving, he caught me. He wanted to kiss me. I gave him one and another slap like this. There were [German] officers sitting there, but I didn’t say anything to them. But I gave him a proper slap. He calmed down. After all, our [conflict] was outside, it wasn’t inside the house.”
“I berated them, and the Banderites said they’d come to get me. So I packed some things and legged it. Dad didn’t know about it, just my sister did. I was in Rovno, I helped out at the office. I helped them with this and that. [Q: At the military unit in Rovno?] Yes. [Q: And you joined the army in Rovno, and you were like...?] In Rovno. I didn’t know what unit they’d put me in. Then I served in the tank brigade.”
“[The Jew] climbed into the stove. You know what stoves used to be like. We had a great big house, lovely gardens, we even had hops. We grew everything. We had forty hectares, that was a lot. I could also ride horses when I was young [laughing]. One time they gave us a horse, a wild sort, my brother was ploughing somewhere, and he was to go to the mill to get the flour milled. I got on the horse, and he bolted. So I grabbed him around the head and twisted him like this, and I sat like this. I couldn’t sit down for a fortnight.”
Captain (ret.) Evženie Meliková, née Horská, was born on 11 November 1924 in the village of Bludov in western Volhynia, which was Polish territory at the time. Her parents had a farm. She attended primary school in Volhynia, followed by a Polish grammar school. In Volhynia she experienced both the Soviet and the Nazi occupation of Ukraine, and as she herself says, after a dispute with members of the Ukrainian Rebel Army and fearing revenge, on 15 August 1944 she joined the 1st Czechoslovak Army Corps. From August to October 1944 she attended a medical course in Kiev, and she then served as a medic in a tank brigade. She participated in the Opava-Ostrava Operation and other battles during the liberation of Czechoslovakia. After the war she settled down in Vysočany (near Hrušovany) in Chomutov District, where she worked on a farm. Her parents re-emigrated in 1947. In the end, Evženie Meliková moved to Žatec, where she died on 24 October 2011.
