“We were walking through a forest, cepju, like they say in Russian, and since the Germans were everywhere, we were walking and all of a sudden the sergeant dropped down. He was our commander. And we passed through. The snipers were somewhere there. We could not see them. We passed and our commander fell dead. It was always a commander who got killed. This was the sergeant. He was a Rusyn from Carpathian Ruthenia. Then there was captain Chlubna. I remember that, he was also killed.”
“At that time they were hunting people for the Soviet army. People would not join, so they were simply hunting them, just like huntsmen do. Whenever they got hold of a young man, off he went to the army and to the front. Naturally, I did not want to go, and so I joined the Czech army instead.”
“The bombs started falling upon us. I had dug such a hole for myself. And when the bombs began falling, I took cover in this hole, and a bomb dropped on the edge of my trench, and the debris covered me and deafened me. That is what I remember. I had good friends there, like Krobinec, and others. They dug me out and they were pulling me through a ditch by a road, all the way to the rear to get away from the front line. I remember this, when I came to myself, their pulling me by my legs through that ditch. And the village they brought me to, there was a barn where they were gathering all who were sick or wounded. So I was lying there. I was bleeding from my ears and from my mouth. And I could not hear anything. They were shouting or what. There was an air raid, we were lying in that barn, and they were dropping bombs there. The artillery was shooting at the place, and I heard nothing. I simply did not hear anything. I thought: That’s it, I am a cripple for life now.”
“When we arrived there, we came into one house and inside there was still food, and all kinds of things. Then we learnt that the Germans had to clear the place before us. It was a village down in a valley, and the Germans were all around there in the forests, and just with the dawn, mines began raining on us. Then there was chaos. We had to retreat from there. And several guys from our unit have already lost their lives there.”
“Usually they were cooking some hard beans. We said the beans looked like seeds from an acacia tree. And we also had canned pork meat; the cooks would throw it all in and cook together. When the situation was quiet, the field kitchen did cook. But there also were times when we did not eat for two days. We carried emergency rations with us. We were receiving them to have something if our supplying failed. Then we would eat these cans we had with us.”
Vladimír Melnik was born December 4th 1927 in Ivačkov in Volhynia. Around 1930 his family moved to the settlement of Krůtí Břeh in Zdolbice. In May 1944 he joined the 1st Czechoslovak independent corps. In Kamenec Podolský he was assigned to the sappers in the 3rd Czechoslovak independent brigade. He was severely wounded before Dukla. He temporarily lost his hearing and he spent time in several hospitals. After his recovery he went to Prague and was assigned to the Žatec army unit. He left the army in 1945 and settled in the Domažlice region. In the same year he joined the Czechoslovak military transport group, with which he was accompanying the convoys of UNRRA on their way from various ports to Czechoslovakia. In 1946 he moved to Rapotín in the Šumperk region. Died in 2016.
