"Daddy farmed that farm. They had to pay for the farm; they got it with priority but they had to pay for it. In the fifties, when the collective farms started there, it was a terrible pressure on them. Daddy was one of the last ones who didn't join the co-operative. They (authorities) had no clue about farming and they forced peasants to join because they knew they had healthy cattle, they had horses, and they needed that - and Daddy was the last one to resist. When they ran out of ideas for how to make him, they said: 'Think it over, either you join the co-op or you go to Siberia!' And Daddy knew what Siberia was, so he signed it."
"He said the Dukla front was the worst. A Russian unit was supposed to go first. The Volhynians were supposed to follow them because they were badly trained, they were all young guys. When Malín was burned out, they all went to take revenge on the Germans for Malín. I know there was a Mr. Heliks who was sixteen years old but said he was eighteen. He was badly wounded, he was treated for a long time and then spent a lot of time in hospitals, he had problems all his life after that. They came there. The Russians had no reconnaissance [unit]... or the unit that was supposed to find out the German positions had failed. The Russians were supposed to go first, then the Volhynians. They let the Volhynians go first, then the Russians followed. It was in Makhnowka. He [Daddy] said: 'We were there like in a cauldron, we were down there, and the Germans were all on top'. They got up in the morning, it had rained at night. He [Daddy] said it was very cold. They got up in the morning and queued up for tea. There was a terrible fog that suddenly lifted. The Germans started firing at them, it was a massacre. The frightened soldiers started running away. Kratochvíl was still in command at that time. He wanted to stop them, he shot five people, his own soldiers, because he said that if he hadn't stopped them the others would have been even worse. Then somehow they managed to do it, but he said it was a terrible massacre. It was wrong that they had to go through Dukla because of the SNP [Slovak National Uprising], because originally it was prepared so that they would go through Romania from down south, and not through these terrible mountains. Daddy was a radio man, and he said: 'It was terrible, bullets were flying around our heads, and my brother and brother-in-law were killed there.'"
"Fortunately, they lived in the western part of Volhynia which was quite well off. They were governed by the Poles and did well while the eastern part was under the Russians, where the kolkhozes had already started. My grandmother recalled people who used to come begging for food because they were dying of starvation. They would come all the time. She said, 'First we gave out bags, then just handfuls because they could eat all of ours.' They always went to the richest farm - they had fifteen hectares, my grandmother said, 'They came every day.' One touching story I describe in the book: a woman came with a little girl, they were begging for food, and the little girl was malnourished, her mother was dragging her tied to her body. Grandma gave them food and said: 'We had a pot with boiled potatoes for the pigs by the stove. She started peeling one potato after another and fed herself and the little girl so that not a piece of potato fell off. They were starving and there was nothing left. It was as if they hadn't eaten at all.' Grandma let them stay overnight, they had breakfast and she gave them more food than usual. When they left, they said it wasn't easy. They always jumped on trains going slower when approaching the station, and they took the train a little further. She said there were already gangs waiting with hooks that they used to pull down the packs with food they had scavenged. Oftentimes, they also pulled down a poor old woman who couldn't hold on, and she was left there with nothing... Those were such drastic moments."
Anna Strnadová was born in Petrovice nad Desnou on 26 May 1950 as the second child of her parents Mikuláš Liščinka and Evženie, née Bartošová. Both parents were born in Volhynia, where their ancestors had moved from the Žatec and Jičín regions in the 1870s. However, like many others, they came to a territory overgrown with forests, which they had to clear and make the land fertile. The mother‘s family lived in Horodište, a Bohemian village in the Rovno district, and the father‘s in the village of Krasilno in the Dubno district in the western part of Volhynia. Wars interfered with the families‘ lives. Almost all men enlisted in 1944 in the 1st Čs. Army Regiment and went through heavy fighting at Dukla. Anna‘s grandfather Antonín Bartoš and her father Mikuláš Liščinka went to fight with his brother Petr, who was killed at Dukla in September 1944. Mikuláš Liščinka came to Czechoslovakia with Svoboda‘s army and settled in Petrovice nad Desnou in the Šumperk region. In 1947, Anna‘s parents‘ families returned to Czechoslovakia as part of the repatriation. That same year, the parents met in Petrovice, and married after a three-month courtship. In the 1950s they lost their farm due to collectivization. Anna Strnadová graduated from a high school of Education in Šumperk, then worked as an educator in Lipová for a year and was admitted to study at the Faculty of Education of Palacký University (UP) in Olomouc in 1969, majoring in Czech-French. She finished her studies in 1973. In the same year she married Radomír Strnad, a student of the Faculty of Science. She and her husband brought up three children - Hana (1979), Pavla (1982) and Radek (1985). After graduation, she taught in Javorník, Velké Losiny, Sobotín, Opava and then in Petrov nad Desnou, where she worked for 11 years before retiring as headmistress. In retirement she started to write. Her books chart primarily the stories of people from the Šumperk region, and she described the difficult lives of her ancestors in the book „Volhynian Rhapsody“ (2023). In 2024, at the time of filming, she lived in Petrov nad Desnou.
The Bartoš family in front of their house in Horodiště in Volhynia, right to left: mother Evženie Lišinková, née Bartošová, grandmother Anna Bartošová, grandfather Antonín Bartoš and son Jaroslav Bartoš
The Bartoš family in front of their house in Horodiště in Volhynia, right to left: mother Evženie Lišinková, née Bartošová, grandmother Anna Bartošová, grandfather Antonín Bartoš and son Jaroslav Bartoš
