“Let’s go to Bohemia. We packed everything up. I don’t remember how long it took – whether it was weeks or months. Then we left for Rovno and got stuck at the station for a week; there were no cars. I could have slept at a friend’s place but didn’t want to. I feared they’d leave me behind. I slept under a cart… wherever I could. The cars arrived after a week and we got on. There is a wide-gauge track to the border, which is where we changed for beautiful Czech cars. Back there, they had provided cars that guys had to repair first, before we could go. The departure was tough, but we were happy to leave. Life got tougher over time. The Ukrainians got too proud and went after Czechs. Not initially, but later on they did.”
“Dad was killed during the very first combat action at Dukla; I never saw him again. They just sent us a message: Polívka was killed in such and such place on such and such date – and that was it.” – “How do you remember dad?” – “I have good memories of him, the best really. He was a great man, and very kind. We missed him.”
“For a while, we kept a young Jewish girl at home. Dad’s friend arranged it. She stayed with us, we gave her Czech clothes, and she went everywhere with us, working in the field and so on. She was a young girl, 15–20 years, or maybe 18. She stayed with us for a while. Dad knew her parents, so we kept her with us to save her life.”
Václav Polívka was born in Ulbárov in Volhynia (in Poland at the time; it is Ukrainian territory today) on 6 March 1934 as the only child to parents Václav and Marie. Both parents were Volhynian Czechs. Sometime in 1941, the family moved to the Czech community of Omelanština and leased a farm from the Pěnička family. This is where they hid a Jewish girl from the Nazis for several months. The father enlisted with the 1st Czechoslovak Army Corps fighting alongside the Red Army in March 1944. He was killed in action during the battle of the Dukla Pass eight months later, on 10 November 1944. At age 13, Václav remigrated to Czechoslovakia with his mother in 1947. They initially settled in Čejkovice near Žatec, then in Lhota (part of Šternberk today), and eventually in nearby Babice, moving into a house with 12 hectares of land attached. They were forced to join the newly formed farming cooperative during the collectivisation period. Václav Polívka took a job at Chronotechna Šternberk immediately after completing his primary education and was employed there as a worker until retirement. He, wife Marie and son Pavel lived in a prefab block in Šternberk for a brief period, before returning to Babice where the witness lived at the time of recording in 2023. Václav Polívka died in August 2023.
