"On the third day my father and I were going back to Malín. We left the horses and everything else in the woods and went back alone. As we were approaching we walked through the burnt as we passed through the gardens and yards. We returned home. Our barn and cowshed were burned down. Our sheep were closed in the shed - managed to escape when the gate burnt and fell down. They (sheep) were burned; their skin and fur on their back was burned. Our dog looked the same. Later on when the thunder storm came the dog crawled behind the kiln and nobody could get him out of there how he was scared. There was a kitchen with the stove. My grandma was sitting there as she couldn´t move well - they pinned her. She was seventy seven or seventy eight years. They (the Nazi soldiers) shot a duck and as my grandma was lying on the bench there they put the duck under her head. That´s how the boors used to deride the poor dead old people. At the end they threw the grenade into our house; luckily it didn´t set the house on fire."
"My mother and sister were burned in the neighbors Dobry’s house. My father found pieces of their clothes and part of my sister´s leg - only her foot from her ankle down with the shoe on it. He showed it to me back then and I still remember it well."
"My uncle - my mother´s brother - stayed with us too. He built a shelter with my father in the basement of Novak´s family house. From there they dug a tunnel through to our well. That was our shelter. Later on as the front line approached, we all went down there. We had food and everything prepared for us for few days there. Everything happened so fast - our horses and animals stayed in the farmyard, the horses were still harnessed in the car. But when we got out of the shelter everything was gone. There were neither horses nor animals. Germans took everything with them. They met Russian soldiers about twelve or thirteen kilometers from here and most of the horses from our village got killed there. There was one or two horses left in our village but those were the ones the Germans didn´t want anymore."
"When my father decided to return we headed back home. On our way we met some Polish girl which warned us not to go to Malín for bad things were happening there. From what she said we understood that something bad is going on there that the soldiers are there etc. Apparently she survived thank to one Polish speaking soldier who threw her to the grain field as she was walking as the last person in the row. So we turned back to the other side and stayed in the woods. Some elderly people were there too. One of them was some old lady named grandma Beštová - I don´t remember the other names anymore...So we stayed there with them. When we then heard the firing we moved from the beginning of the wood deeper inside and walked to the path leading to Pijaň village. After a while we heard the noise of passing trucks as they were driving on the road nearby. After that we returned back again. It started to rain."
"After 1945 Czechoslovak military expedition arrived to Český Malín. They took some of the mold from the common graves and entrusted my father to deliver it officially to Czechoslovakia. They filled in a galvanized tank or two with it. They it went to be handed over in Košice town."
Mr. Josef Řepík was born on February 2nd 1934 in Český Malín village in Volhynia. He is among the small group of citizens of this village, who almost miraculously survived the burn of the village by Nazi soldiers in July of 1943. In 1947 he and his family moved to former Czechoslovakia. His father along with couple of other survived inhabitants was entrusted by authorities to bring the mold from the common graves from Český Malín to Czechoslovakia. The family settled down in Frankštát town in Šumperk region, which was shortly officially renamed Nový Malín. The mold which the Řepík´s family brought from their village has been ordered into the monument of the victims of Český Malín placed behind the Frankštát church. Josef Řepík began to be consistently interested in fate of the inhabitants of Malín town, he began to collect the materials and documentation about the life of Czechs in Volhynia and later also in Czechoslovakia. He knew most of the living former inhabitants of Czech Malín town. He died on January 27, 2019.
