Alexandr Stejskal

"Češi tam dovezli... děda tam dovezl, když tam byl s těma rodičema, tak tam dovezli pluh. A řeknu vám, ten pluh, to obdivovali tak jako když se jezdí tady do Brna na výstavu, tak tam jezdili ti atamani normálně se koukat, co to je za čert. Prej 'To je nějakej čert, to obrací zem!' Předtím tam oni orali tu půdu hákama. To měli takovej, říkali tomu socha, to táhli a ženský normálně s motykama a hrabičkama to urovnávaly. A když tam přijel děda, tak si zapálil cigaretu, to ruchadlo postavil do řádku prvního a a držel to za jednu ruku to držadlo a šel vedle. Tak ten ataman tam říkal 'Čech, já ti postavím barák za to, za to všechno, že ty to naučíš ty kozáky tady,' on říkal kozáky těm kovářům, 'Ty je naučíš, jak se to dělá!' A tak oni přijeli, oni byli velice šikovní ti kováři, okoukli ten pluh a za 14 se tam rojily pluhy po celý tý... Ty Češi tam dovezli kulturu, dovezli tam... třeba takový jenom poznatek krátkej. Začali vyvážet hnůj, mrvu chlévskou, na pole. A Ukrajinci říkali 'To bude to obilí smrdět! Ježišmarja co děláte Češi!' No a pak viděli takovýhle klasy, o tolik vyšší, tak začali i tu mrvu odendávali a začali taky teda ten pozemek hnojit si, přihnojovat, aby měli lepší úrodu"

“And when they came saying that they’d de-kulak us, Gramps poured the Russian major about half a litre of vodka and then, when he’d softened up, he took Gramps around the shoulders and said: ‘Czech, I know what you built up here, I’m not that stupid. But I got an order. I’ve come to de-kulak you, but what am I to do. If I don’t de-kulak you, they’ll strip my stripes off and send me to Siberia.’ So he said: ‘You know what, I’ll take just four beehives, say that we hadn’t found you here, that you’d been away somewhere.’ So they came to an agreement like that with Gramps, they took and loaded the four beehives on to car with the soldiers. The bees flew out, stung them, as they’d chucked them in a heap there, and someone then took them and brought them back again.”

“I came there for the first time in 1955; I was ten years old and Mum took me with her. We changed trains in Lviv - that was a beautifully repaired train station, it wasn’t bombed up, it was newly repaired, and I came there with my mother. We went into the waiting room, and our train left four hours later. We stepped down inside, and when I saw all those people missing arms, missing legs, all those front-liners decorated with medals. Some of them even sat on these wide pieces of plank, they had four wheels, and they pushed themselves about along the ground, moving around. And I said: ‘Mum, where have you taken me?’ I remember bursting into tears. Afraid. I’d never seen so many invalids. Those were all war veterans, and Mum told me at the time: ‘You know, those are people from Russia.’ That was in 1955, to bring the children some bread and potatoes. So just imagine what it was like in Russia a whole ten years after the war. They didn’t have basic groceries.”

“Some six thousand of our soldiers came here in 1945, who’d fought in the Czechoslovak Army Corps, including the 400 girls, so they already stayed put in Bohemia. After the end of the second world war. And we arrived, you could say practically in less than two years, in the bitterest of frost in February; we arrived in the kind of freight wagons they’d used to take Jews to Auschwitz in - so they used those same wagons to take us here. In February. So they were plugged up with straw, and off we went before Comrade Stalin changed his mind, so they wouldn’t keep us there... In the course of two and a half months, 33,000 of us came here; I was two years old at the time. So some 39 to 40,000 of us came here in all, quite a lot.”