Ivan Mohorita

“In the hospital, each evening they pumped 20 milliliters of pure alcohol into my hand. Of course it got directly into my blood and I started singing and the nurses had to hold me back. But that was the way they treated injuries at the time. The doctor, surgeon who operated on me, his name was Burdienko, asked me if I had drunk at the front. I told him: ‘Not a lot but when I did, I drank it as water.’ We used to drink cups full of pure alcohol; sometimes we put some water in it. He said: “Harasho!” I didn’t know why he was asking but then he told me that if I hadn’t I wouldn’t have stand the cure, it would have killed me. And I had to sign a paper about ten times that I don’t want my arm to be amputated. Because when he saw it, it seemed like the only solution for him. But I told him: 'I would rather die than having to live without an arm.'”

“I was born in Volove, that is in the mountains. But we lived in Khust, which is a bigger city in the south. My mother lived just out of the vegetables she had grown in her garden but she also had a pension because my father died as a war veteran. It wasn’t more than a few hundred but she managed to gave her two sons a grammar school education.” “But you don’t remember much of your father, do you? When did he die?” “He died in 1936 when I was in the third grade at the grammar school. But he wasn’t staying at home, he was always somewhere in hospital with tuberculosis and pneumonia so my memories of my father are always connected with hospitals.”

“Once during the night... I went to the headquarters but actually I went to the Germans (The situation was chaotic – editor’s note). And when the guy at the heavy machine gun saw me, he started to fire – that was about 20 meters – and he hit me. But fortunately he hit only my arm so that I stayed alive. But I was bleeding really hard, it must have been some kind of a dum-dum bullet because the wound was enormous. So the problem was how to stop the bleeding. It was in September and we still had only shirts, not the jackets yet, but those were good English shirts made out of heavy cloth so I took a piece of wood and I twisted the sleeve so I managed to strangulate the artery and the bloodstream and to stop the bleeding. Then I was waiting for the sundown and trying to crawl very slowly through the ditch until the Soviet sapper units found me.”

“In Vorkuta, they gave us a boxcar, they put plank beds and gave us a heater because it was cold and they sent the train to Buzuluk. Nobody cared about that, because this train was officially sent directly to Buzuluk. They fed us so that they gave us cards and when we stopped at certain stations, they came to us and gave us hot water to make some tea. And so we went by this train – as far as I remember – some 15 days until we got from Vrokuta to Buzuluk.”

“In prisons, we didn’t work. We were arrested and we lived in prisoners’ conditions. Then they transported us further east to Ukraine and further.” “And where exactly did you go?” “To Novocherkassk, which is somewhere further east behind Kyiv (Novocherkassk lies in the Rostov area in south Russia, ed. note). There we each waited for half a year or a year because the courts were strange and they always took a long time. Then they told us the sentences and then it started... But I’d better told you about... When I left the country, there were some 50 or 60 thousand people like me, leaving before, after or at the same time as I did. Young people who were full of life and strength and they had a vision that they will find some help in this Slavic country. That they would lend us some weapons and that we will go back to liberate Carpathian Ruthenia and Czechoslovakia. From the beginning, we were Czechoslovak patriots, nobody had to stir this in us in any way.”

“Subcarpathian Ruthenia found itself in the situation where the northern borders were occupied by Russians. I went with a group of former students from Chust, and I thought they I might be able to find a second home in the Soviet Union. When they asked where we were going or what we wanted, we said that we wanted to live in Russia. They questioned us the whole day and the whole night - they wanted to somehow find out that we were spies. I was landed with five years of prison for that. They did the same with Poles and with all the other nations: if they arrested you, they put you on trial and sent you to the Far East or to Siberia. That’s how I found myself north of the polar circle.”

“What did they ask you during the interrogations?” “They wanted to know who sent us and what our mission was and so on. That we were spies to monitor the location of Soviet forces – just bullshit. I could see that the young man who interrogated me didn’t believe it either. He seemed to be doing it because he had to. But that he wouldn’t believe that there were 18 year old boys like me who left their country to go to a bigger Slavic country and ask for help, that’s nonsense.”

“It also happened once... The Germans left tank cars there, full of honey. And my servant, he was a young boy and he was sniffing around and he found the honey. So he found a bucket somewhere in a barn and he wanted to take some, but as he was so small and he slipped and fell right into it and you should have seen him when he came back to us and he was all covered in honey and he said: “I got a little wet.” So there were funny moments in every war. Just a coincidence. But unfortunately, then we had to move on. Children had to come and remove the honey from him. His Name was Tajstr. Pete, Pete Tajstr.”

“After the outbreak of the war they found coal in the village of Vorkut. The Russians started hauling up workers there from the whole country - it was necessary to dig out the coal, build a railway, and take the coal to Mother Russia. When you spat on the ground, it landed as a piece of ice, that’s how freezing it was. Forty-five degrees [centigrade] below zero! Most of the workers came from Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Hungary, and so on. We weren’t used to such frost, so the death rate was high. But we adapted quickly. I worked at the hospital as an orderly. People suffered from avitaminosis, only later did they discover that fermented pine needles can be used to prepare a drink rich in vitamin C.”