Evdokie Havlíčková

"So we were evacuated to Kazakhstan. There, they turned a school building into a hospital. During the day, I was helping there in the kitchen, to earn a living, since I was not even fifteen years old then. In the evening, I was attending a nursing school. There were more of us, all orderlies who have not completed a nursing school. So we would always cross a bridge from Asia to Europe. The school was in Europe, we lived in Asia. There was a great river, the Ural. When we finished school - the study was shortened, only two and a half years - I worked in that hospital for some time and then we were taken to the front."

"During the first months on the front, we spent more time crying than helping. We were not used to all this bombing, and all these dead and wounded, and the blood. Oh, Christ...When was it? In 1944. I experienced the end of the war in a Kiev hospital, because I was hit by a splinter. They sent the entire echelon of the seriously wounded to Kiev, and I was assigned to accompany them. Then, they let me stay there, I could not do much of the nursing work, so I was ordered to operate the telephone. I stayed there a couple of months, and then the end of the war came. I remained in Kiev. My husband had arrived there before, he had been injured for a short time, we married there and he went back to the front again. He stepped on a landmine, and it tore both his legs off. He was sent again to the Kiev hospital, and from there, we - now as a husband and wife - moved to Czechoslovakia. First we lived in Hořice, in the Podkrkonoší region, there was an army sanatorium there."

"Pardon my mentioning it, but you get your period, there is no place to clean yourself, to wash your clothes. The things to remember are the din of war, shooting, all these dead and wounded people. There is nothing good about the war. What is the use of speaking about it? I´m glad that it´s over now. God be praised that it´s over. It was just misery, it was suffering. For instance, they bombed the kitchen several times, we had nothing to eat, they gave us three biscuits...What we had was kipjatok, hot water, and we would even lick salt in order to become thirsty, to drink."

"Memories of war? - There´s nothing left of it today. It has all faded away after these sixty-one years. One has somehow resigned, one does not take it this way. I don´t know what to say. There would be no such front today. Today, they just throw a bomb and it´s all over in an instant, back then they would carry it on for five years. One cannot just describe and explain it this way. You must live it on your own. If one does not live it through, one cannot imagine it, cannot understand it. At least that´s what I think. I don´t know."