Bohuslav Kovalčuk

“The thing with the Russian Jews is that they didn’t put them into concentration camps as they did with the Jews from the rest of Europe, they simply shot them at the spot. For example in Luck, where we lived, there were three Jewish families. What happened is that they put them all together in a farmhouse. They ‘concentrated’ them, so to speak. It worked pretty much the same all around Russia, not just where we lived. They concentrated the local Jewish families from the Luck area in such ‘small concentration camps’. These camps were not of the same sort like the big concentration camps where they put the Jews from the Protectorate, like Theresienstadt or Auschwitz. These were just provisional camps. Sometimes, somebody managed to escape and these Jews were then hiding somewhere in the area, mostly some relatives or friends would have them at their place. My mom once found a Jewish girl hiding in a hay pile, so she fed her and we kept her at our place for some time. The Germans would dig holes at the outskirts of the town or somewhere in the forests, bring the Jews in Lorries, shoot them and bury them in the mass graves. My wife is from Luck and her dad once saw the killing of Jews by Germans as he passed by. They had to get undressed and then they got shot and thrown into the pits. So that’s how it worked in Russia. They didn’t kill them in concentration camps but shot them locally. That’s how most of the Jews that didn’t manage to flee with the Red Army died.”

“I was stationed at the general staff headquarters and had some friends who were sappers. Their task was to clear minefields or to set charges, lay mines and the like. When they had nothing to do they were waiting for the next orders at the headquarters. Sometimes, they would also bring food to the soldiers who fought in the first battle line. One of them, Vláďa, told me that they’re going to the front to bring the soldiers food. After about two hours, they came back. He called my name and I came out and saw that one of his hands was missing. It didn’t impress me at all and I just said: ‘Thank God it didn’t blow off your head”! Or another time, I saw our radio operator being hit by a nearby explosion. His charred back was riddled with shrapnel splinters. You get to see so many corpses in war that you don’t even notice. After a while, it doesn’t affect you anymore. Another situation I remember is when I was sitting on a small armored transporter which drove across a creek which was receiving heavy bombardment from the Germans. The creek and surrounding area was littered with dead bodies as that place was very hard to reach and for now, while the shelling was still going on, they just left the corpses there to be recovered later. I remember that the transporter just drove over the corpses crushing them underneath it and that it didn’t do anything to me. I got used to such things and it didn’t affect me anymore. I totally understand the soldiers in the first lines of attack who don’t care too much about being hit when they are storming an enemy position. You get so hardened in war that you don’t have any feelings anymore.”

“When the Russians came to Volhynia, great terror started. We were afraid to even think in front of them because they could notice from our faces that we were thinking in the wrong way. The mayor was a great Communist and I was really afraid to run into him on the street. I was fourteen or fifteen years old back then in 1939. I didn’t want to look suspicious because the NKVD was raiding the town. They were able to exile a whole village to Siberia. I went to school back then and there was another Czech there with me, Bohouš Polatů. Once we came to class and fifteen boys were missing. The NKVD came for them in the morning and they never came back again. We were scared to death by the NKVD. The NKVD and the Gestapo are the same.”

“Well, I was a twenty-year old village lad with no inclination to the army but I joined the Czechoslovak army enthusiastically. We all joined the army with great enthusiasm. We could, of course, have joined the Soviet army instead, but nobody would do that. We all joined the Czechoslovak army. We knew that Stalin and Beneš had agreed that after the war the Germans would be driven out and that we would be repatriated to Czechoslovakia. Whole families, all the 45.000 people would be repatriated to Czechoslovakia. So that’s what we were looking forward to when we were entering the army. Well, I was a twenty-year old, but you have to consider that also the forty-year olds or even fifty-year olds with families and children at home were rushing into the army enthusiastically. No one was thinking about the battles to come but about coming to Czechoslovakia after the war.”