“We crossed the border in Eastern Prussia (near Klaipeda). Me, as a radio operator, I had to carry all the heavy transmitters and equipment. At first, as a telegraph operator, I carried the thin field cable, later I had to carry the heavy cable that we had to carry on our backs. Our task was to maintain the connection between the operation unit, where they had about eight of those telephones, and the units at the frontline, the observers and the rest. If the connection was interrupted, we had to find where it happened and connect the two lines again. It wasn’t easy, especially in winter, that was in 1941. Both the soldiers at the frontline and the commanders in the operation unit desperately needed to maintain the connection. Sometimes the wire was sparking as we were trying to fix them together. Sometimes we also had to operate under gunfire. We always had to find one end of the cable, tie it to a something higher and then search in a great circle for the other end. And that was not an easy job.”
“It happened in December 1941. At Vyazma. Russians managed to break the offensive. I was between Klin and Vyazma, about 35 kilometers further east. We saw Moscow right in front of us, but we had to retreat back to Belarus to Smolensk and Vitebsk. And it was there where I was injured. I was looking for a disconnected wire and I was hit by a shrapnel in the heel and in the lungs. I didn’t know I had a shrapnel in my lungs. I was transported with other casualties by a train to central Germany where I spent the years 1941, 1942 and 1943 in a hospital. It was a hospital for higher ranked German officers, the Sommerstein sanatorium in the Thuringia mountains, really a nice luxurious sanatorium. There I got scrub typhus became partly paralyzed so they trained me as an assistant for first aid, nursing and rehabilitation. I worked as an x-ray operator and a masseur until 1944. then came the unsuccessful attempt to assassinate Hitler and Himmler was again named the chief commander of the armed forces. He thought that nursing can be done by women. So we all had to return to the army and to the front. I got far north and east, above Riga and Narwa (Estonia). And when we had to retreat from the hill and we came to Liepaja (Lipau), which was at the seashore. It was the first city above the Lithuanian border. There were Klaipeda – Memel and then Latvia, Liepaja and Ventspils. And there I spent more than a year. I was a commander of a medical unit and I had several nurses under command, they were trained and recruited either in Lithuania or in Germany. I was a commander of a gauze exchange and first aid unit right at the train station.”
“There was an area of about eighty kilometers that was under German control. And there I had the opportunity, same as I’m sitting here today with you, to meet face to face with [Ferdinand] Schörner who had the area, the whole Courland, under command. The strap of land was about eight kilometers wide and some 30-40 kilometers along the seashore leading to Estonia. And when this Schörner needed to fill a gap in the frontline, he took some heavy army trucks and he came to a town and closed some streets and took everyone, no matter if they had the training or not, everybody had to go to the front and an hour later they could easily be dead... I was lucky once. I managed to hide in a cinema. I used to go to that cinema, sometimes they played German movies. So I hid behind the projector and I stayed there until it was all over and then I came out. Then I joined the medical units where the soldiers were issued with gauze and medicine.”
“At the end of the war, they trained us again in Dundanga and they wanted to send us to the front again, that was in Easter, 1st and 2nd April 1945. And then, when Germany surrendered and we had to throw the whole artillery to the local lake. And some of the men were playing with that and they threw a grenade into the lake and a large school of dead fish of all shapes and sizes came out. From there, I was escorted with other German soldiers to a city called Boksitogorsk, the raw material used to make aluminum was called “boksito”. There were steelworks that produced aluminum and another supporting factory. I met with a colonel who served in Ostrava, so we could speak Czech. I served him and I really can’t complain about anything. My Russian was already perfect from the previous military campaigns in Russia.” “And you were there already as a prisoner?” “Yes.” “And how did the Russians treat you? And how did you fall into captivity” “I was captured in Dundanga on the 12th of May 1945. That was on the 12th, not on the 8th. The Americans almost buried us under a pile of leaflets saying that the war had ended. But the Russians kept guarding a bridge there. From there I got to a camp in Jelgava (Ger. Mitau), south from Riga. From there I was deported to Boksitogorsk, as I said before, where I served from the beginning as a translator.“
“I didn’t participate in the fights directly. I was a “funker”, a telegraph operator, we didn’t fight in the first lines unless it was absolutely necessary. We maintained the connection between the frontline and the tail. But sometimes we experienced gun and cannon fire when repairing the disconnected wires. And I saw it many times when they fired the cannons right into the cavalry. Those were men on horses who ensured the supplies of food to the soldiers in the front lines and the enemy planes and artillery had chosen certain spots like crossroads and they kept shooting at them. Once I also spent two hours lying in the mud, waiting for the fire to stop. And I also saw a grenade hitting one of the cavalry men and they hanged on all of the trees around, both the horse and the soldier... things like this happened at the front. And at the medical units, I had a room for myself, and when the trains with the casualties came, it was used for first aid.”
Pavel Návrat was born on 13th March 1921 in Bolatice, North Moravia. He comes from a German-Polish area that was annexed to Czechoslovakia in the 1920s. His parents still had their German citizenship but he was born as a Czechoslovak citizen. His father was a locksmith and his mother worked in Frankfurt am Main in a factory for processing of old cloth. Later on, his father started his own business. He owned a pneumatic hammer and a petrol propelled press and he visited farmers and repaired equipment and machines. Pavel Návrat was an apprentice for a barber, cosmetician and wig producer. During the occupation of Czechoslovakia, he immediately received a German passport and he had to enter the Reich work service called Arbeitsdienst. After the compulsory service, he entered the Wehrmacht in June 1941. He served as a radar operator, radio operator and in the medical units. He belonged to the centre forces in the Operation Barbarossa. His units got as far as Moscow but then they were forced to retreat. He was injured in Belarus and transferred to a sanatorium in central Germany. He fell ill with scrub typhus and he was partly paralyzed. He miraculously recovered and then was trained as a medical worker. After 1944, he assisted in the baths, operated the x-ray and massaged the patients. In 1944, the Reich SS Fuhrer Heinrich Himmler called wounded soldiers in Návrat‘s category to return back to the frontline. Pavel Návrat joined the army again and he served in Riga and in Liepaja (Lipau) in the first aid units as a commander of a bandage redressing unit. At the end of the war, he was captured in Dundanga by the Americans who handed him over to the Russians. He was sent to Boksitogorsk near Leningrad where he worked in aluminum steelworks. Russian authorities didn‘t want to release him back to Czechoslovakia, so he stayed in Boksitogorsk until 1949. Eventually, he met major Melnikov who served in Ostrava during the war and who helped to negotiate Návrat‘s return to Czechoslovakia. Návrat worked in a factory in Krnov which produced socks and stockings, until he retired. Pavel Návrat died on May 3, 2010.
