"[We went] to the Slovak border and it was in this valley. We were on such a long peak, sprawling, bare, without forests, and on the other side - on the road, behind the passage - there were overgrown hills and there the Germans had their defenses, buried cannons, mortars and heavy machine guns, bunkers and just about everything. They had us in the palm of our hand, because the hill was not forested. They had it all covered. When we first left the trenches and started attacking Dukla, they started firing into us there. It was impossible, there was no way forward. We had to back off. "
"[So we went for maybe an hour.] Maybe not. We walked down through the forest, there was this plain, and suddenly we see that there is a bunker. There was a patrol there, a Russian soldier. We had arrived. So the commander welcomed us and began negotiations with our ensign. In the meantime, evening came and we tried to lie down or sit down somewhere because the person was tired. So we sat in the bunker. I found out that there was such a bunk bed made of spruce logs and there was a twig under the bunk bed as well. So I made myself comfortable under the bunk bed. "
"There was such a mood! In Rovno, it was a district town and there was a drainage commission. We walked there. So they took us away, I was assigned to the Third Infantry Battalion as a light machine gun operator and a disc charger. Then all sorts of exercises began around Lutsk. "
Václav Valoušek was born on November 6, 1924, in the village of Teremno in Volhynia in what was then Poland. Before the Second World War, he completed seven grades of primary school and then attended a Czech Kindergarten in Lutsk. As part of the so-called fourth division of Poland, on September 17, 1939, the Soviet Union occupied the Rivnen region and Václav Valoušek worked as an auxiliary employee at the Statistical Office in Lutsk during the Soviet occupation. On June 22, 1941, Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union, and for the next three years, the witness worked on the railroad. After the re-arrival of the Red Army in the Rivne region, Václav Valoušek joined the emerging 1st Czechoslovak Army Corps on March 23, 1944 in Rivne. He was assigned to the 3rd Infantry Battalion of the 1st Brigade as a light machine gun operator. After training in Bessarabia, he participated in the fighting in Machnówka and the Carpathian-Dukla operation. At Nižný Komárnik, he was wounded in the arm during a mortar shelling and was treated at a field hospital in Posada Jaśliska and subsequently in Lviv. Here he also experienced the end of the war and then went back to his native Teremno to visit his parents. He had to report regularly to the military commission in Rivne, from where a Red Army officer wanted to call him to the so-called stripes, who fought against the guerrillas of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army. However, the witness managed to avoid this and in 1947 he left for Czechoslovakia by military transport. Subsequently, his family also re-emigrated to Czechoslovakia. Václav Valoušek settled in Stekník near Žatec and worked at the State Farm. He married and had a total of three children with his wife. Václav Valoušek died on October 17, 2020.
