Miloslav Šatava

* 1928

  • "I got seriously wounded when a shell fragment smashed my knee. My friends took care of me immediately and they transported me to a dressing-station. A lot has been written about the camaraderie among soldiers, but there is a difference between friendship during the military service and at the warfront. Anything can happen, but if you haven’t experienced it, you don’t know what it is like. I, myself, have seen several men who went to save their friends and risked their lives even though they had not been ordered to do so. In the same way, my friends carried me to the hospital."

  • "I was sitting on a box full of grenades, artillery shells were flying all over the place, and I was writing a letter home. I had grown so numb. If I had used my common sense I would never have been able to do something like that."

  • "It was not usual for the draft committee to accept children of my age. I know that there were boys of the same age before me and after me who wanted to join the army, and who didn’t get accepted. It was perhaps because I came there at the time when the 3rd independent Czechoslovak brigade was being formed and they were probably accepting any able-bodied person. I was strong and square-built, and so they drafted me."

  • "Talking about the events from the war? I was refusing to talk about these things. The warfront, where I had been during my adolescence, was a very traumatizing experience for me which took me a long time to cope with. I tried to put these experiences away from my mind as much as I could and it took me years. I was refusing interviews with journalists who wanted to talk to me about the life on the front. I don’t want to talk too much about these individual combat situations. Firstly, mine is a very subjective view, and secondly, it is not essential for a comprehensive picture of the events."

  • "The person who appeared there was probably my guardian angel. She was a Georgian doctor and her kids might have been of my age. She probably realized what it meant for me. She persuaded her colleagues that they ought to try one more surgery, and that she would take it as her 'socialist commitment.' (laughing). As long as I am alive, I will never cease being grateful to her because I am able to walk almost normally."

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    Dobříš, 10.07.2012

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The first professor among the Volhynian Czechs

After his release from the hospital - Volhynia, April 1945
After his release from the hospital - Volhynia, April 1945
zdroj: archív pamětníka

Professor Miloslav Šatava, the first Volhynian Czech to be appointed a professor, was born in 1928 in Volhynia in the village Buršovka Česká. In late spring 1944, when he was fifteen and a half, he applied to join the Czechoslovak army corps. He was drafted and served in the artillery. He experienced combat before the Dukla Pass (Machnuvka) and was seriously wounded while fighting at Dukla. He sustained a leg injury caused by a shell fragment and was transported to Georgia for treatment. After the end of the war he studied at a secondary school in Prague, from which he graduated in 1948. Afterwards he studied at the College of Agriculture and Forestry and then worked at universities, at the Ministry of Education and in the Research Institute for Biofactors. In 1975 he was appointed professor in the field of applied genetics of livestock. He retired in 1994, and since 2000 he has been living in Dobříš. In 1990 he was one of the founders of the Association of Czechs from Volhynia and their Friends, and he served as its chairman in 1990-1993.