"There was a man named Mr. Emil Zahrádka from our village that was suffering from a war injury. I spoke to him before his surgery, which I also attended. As far as I could tell, the injury didn’t look terrible, but I was just the nurse. His injury was somewhere around here (she shows the location) and he said: ´What do you think, am I going to loose the leg or not?´ And I replied: ´Your injury doesn’t look that bad to me.´ But he lost his whole leg and when he was leaving the hospital he called for me. He was capable of moving and begged me not to write home that he lost his leg, because he was married."
"And from there we headed to Prague. Along the road we saw dead bodies- not humans, but horses and other things such as old weapons. We were on the way to the village of Škvorec by Prague. We stayed there for about a month."
"My dad stayed there as a captive during WWI. He met my mom there and they decided to get married. My mom came from the village of Kvasilov. When their son was born in 1922, they moved back to Bohemia. My mom didn’t like it there because there was not any work- nothing. So, they decided to move back to Volhynia again."
"I received a letter in Donbas that I was supposed to go work to the coal mines. I don’t remember which month it was. In order to avoid working there, we went to the town of Rovno to apply for the army. This way I would not have to go to Russia to work in the mine. They gave me some sort of confirmation ticket and I no longer had to worry about it.
It was a confirmation that I was now in the army."
"We attended several hospitals during the course. They were performing a biopsy of someone in the same room as where the head surgeries were....I had to assist with these surgeries. I used to be the assistant in the operating room."
Mrs. Marie Tasová, neé Šimková, was born on November 18th 1922 in the town of Kvasilov in Volhynia. Her father, Václav, originally came to Volhynia when he was captured by the Austro-Hungarian army. There he remained. In 1944, Maria was assigned to work in the coal mines of Eastern Ukraine (Donbas). She managed to avoid working in the mines, however, by entering the first Czechoslovakian independent corps. There, she graduated from nursing school. After graduation, she was assigned to the medical unit of the third Czechoslovakian independent corps. Later, on January 7th 1945, she was sent to the front near the town of Liptovský Mikuláš to assist the surgeons stationed there. She spent the end of the war in the region surrounding the town of Prostějov. During February of 1946, she was demobilized to sergeant rank. A 14 acre property and estate was then assigned to her in Libina, Germany. From 1957 until 1977, she worked in the agricultural cooperative (JZD) in the town of Libina. She remained in Libina until her death in August 2011.
