Lieutenant Viktor Ráža

“I saw a broken shop window of the stationary and I was looking for something and then I heard two shots and I come out and saw two drunk Russian soldiers. They were drunk because there was a large distillery there. They got drunk were lying under the trees and a captain came and ordered them to stand up. The Russians were retreating because the Germans advanced. And the soldiers insulted the captain, they were quite good in insulting. So he got angry, took out a pistol and shot them both. I asked him why did he do that and he said: ’You are just a boy.’ I was eighteen then. ‘If I let them here, they get caught. And the Germans will interrogate them, torture them and shoot them anyway. So it doesn’t really matter. And I’m not going to drag them all.’ And there were plenty of drunken soldiers, and they paid dear for that.”

“Russian partisans came – the Soviets. By chance, one of the partisans, when hw was captured by the Germans, he worked at my father’s sister five kilometers away. He knew my dad so he came to us. It was night work, they were hidden during the day and in the night they operated. So we hided him in a small bedroom behind my parents’ bedroom, the children usually slept there. And then a Bandera group came, there was about twelve of them, so they had to go to the barn. They made a wall out of hay and they hid behind that. And then later in the evening, Moško. So we had to hide him somewhere. They mustn’t know about each other. In the morning, just when we tidied up – a bunch of Hungarians, deserters, they run away from the Germans. They stopped by and they wanted something to eat. Of course – we had lard and alcohol. We had to keep supplies. When the meat was running out, we had to kill pigs, because we still had enough of them. The Hungarians had fed and then, by instinct or something, they decided to hurry on. And they might have been a kilometer away and a cart came with a motorcycle drawn after it, they couldn’t ride it because of the mud. Those were Germans. And they asked about the Hungarians. And wee told them that they already left. And they wanted something to eat, they always had someone who spoke Czech, someone from the Sudetenland. So we took out the lard and the alcohol again. They had eaten and they didn’t hurry so to get the Hungarians. So maybe we saved even them.”

“The chief came to me and said: ‘We will be moving on May 9th, get enough of fuel.’ So we went for the petrol and I took a Russian soldier and I asked him if the truck was all right. He said yes and we set out for the trip. We had the barrels in the bucket, we went on for a moment and then the truck stopped. The idiot had some loose screws or something. It all tilted and cut the tubes that went to the breaks, so the car stopped to break. He didn’t seem to mind. They repaired everything. He mended that and we started again. I asked him: ‘How are you going to brake?’ He didn’t know. And when we went back, we went down the hill and I told him to drive at the first or second gear for the engine to slow down the truck. But he was breaking with a cardan break. That was a small break attached to the cardan axis. And then we saw people trying to tell us something, so I looked out and I saw that the back of the truck was on fire. The bucket full of barrels with petrol and the bottom of the truck on fire. I pointed my gun at him and ordered him to put out the fire, ‘Either you put it out or I shoot you!’ He took off his coat, I also gave him my coat and a blanket and he managed to put it out. But any smallest leak could have blasted the whole truck.”

“My granddad was a hero. He was in the first war. I will tell you a story we used to laugh about. He came home after the Bolsheviks had raided our farm. And he had been in the Tsar’s army, so he escaped and then he returned home. And the women were sitting there on the porch and they were sad. My granddad came and they greeted and of course they were happy to see him again and especially my grandma. And they talked and one of the aunts said: ‘Václav, you know what they did to us? They took our horse. Such a beautiful horse it was.’ ’Damned, women, you can’t give horses to the Bolsheviks! If I were at home they wouldn’t get it,’ he started boasting… So they were talking and then a patrol was passing by, two men on horses. They didn’t have any shoes and a rope through the horse’s mouth, a rifle on the rope. And they stopped and, ‘Zdravstvuj, zdravstvuj.’ And my grandpa said: ‘What are you looking at?’ And they said: ‘Your shoes.’ My granddad had fine army boots. They started to argue and the soldier pointed the gun at my granddad and klick, klick, ‘Give me the boots!’ And my granddad had a look as if it was worth to get shot after all that. And he took off the boots and handed them to the soldier.”