Olga Lugertová

* 1925

  • "There in Slovakia, there were no such stories as we had work to do all of the time. We couldn’t go anywhere and those Ukrainians were looking after us. Because we were only four Czechs, so that there were no complaints on them from our side. So they looked after every single step of ours. We had to announce everything, where and what are we going to do, and anyway we didn’t have any spare time."

  • "They [the Volhynian farmers] went to see the Czechs, how they do it and learn from them. And they looked and said, 'how come you throw out the dung?' The Czechs would answer, ´Well, we do it because later we put it on the fields and get a good harvest.´ So they also started to do that. No longer would they let cows stand in the dung up to the ceiling. So they did that and than said, ´Well, they are not dumb but smart.´ They didn’t laugh at them anymore but rather learned to do everything from them."

  • "I was then at the fields with the cows just when a German airplane flew over. At once I saw that he was approaching and flying very low. There were such balk so I hid in but he kept peeking. In the meantime the cow ran away into the clover and ate a lot of it because I couldn’t turn her out. Then when they saw that there was no one there, they flew away. So I quickly brought the cow back home where uncle Jirásek had to kick her waist so that it [the gas] went out."

  • "So there in Liptovský Hrádek it was the worst because somewhere between there is Svatý Mikuláš and heavy combats took place there. There was a river and the Germans were on one side while our soldiers on the other. As they were shooting, all the rockets and bombs were flying as far as to us. And we had lots and lots of wounded. They shouted: take me!, take me!, you will let me bleed to death here. We didn’t know where to put everyone, as they were all around. "

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    Litoměřice, 03.03.2004

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    délka: 52:05
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„In my life, a biblical truth has been verified, that man rules over another to his own hurt.“

Lugertova1_crop.jpg (historic)
Olga Lugertová
zdroj: Olga Lugertová

  Olga Lugertová, nee Budová, was born in 1925 in Hulč at Volyhnia, where her grandparents moved to from Bohemia. Her parents were farmers. She attended Polish school until the division of Poland and annexation of Volyhnia by the Bolsheviks in 1939. Two years later, Germans occupied the area, who, according to Ms. Lugertová, didn‘t treat Czechs particulary badly there. On the contrary they protected civilians against raids and murders by Bandera‘s Ukrainian nationalists. Immediately after the re-occupation of Volyhnia by the Russians in 1944, a forced recruitment to the Soviet army took place. Olga Lugertová was taken to Kyiv where she underwent a six-month medical training. It focused on teaching the participants the principles of surgery so that they could work as medics at the front. At the beginning of 1945, she and three other Czechs were moved to a field hospital in Malá Polana, Slovakia. Then Ms. Lugertová followed the advancing units through Slovakia. She has the worst memories of the combat by Liptovský Mikuláš, where there were so many wounded that they had nowhere to put them. The end of the war reached her on Czech territory, where she had never been before. She got as far as to Theresienstadt and subsequently, she began to serve as a dentist in Litoměřice. Her parents followed her to Bohemia.