František Levý

“One day, our driver made me angry. He was a Russian. It was hard work, there were stumps everywhere. In summer it was terribly hot and our soldiers were black with dirt, you couldn’t even recognize their faces because they got so dirty when working among those stumps. And so many of them were lying in that place where the road led to the forest, the soldiers had been laid among those stumps. They covered them with a bit of ground and he ran over them with a Studebaker. I was furious that day. Couldn’t say anything, because one of them was a communist. Two of these soldiers were planted among us. We had two Gaz cars there. One driver, our boy, and the other, there were two Russians in the staff. And then we had those resembling off-road cars, those small ones. And at that time I saw these boys of ours, so black, so many of them were lying there. He did not have to run over them. He could have kept going but he rode right over them. The car, this American vehicle, just swayed a little. There was a bit of ground on them, that was it.”

“The core of the army came, moving on these main roads towards Russia. Then a recon arrived, as a purge to that village. They arrived there, positioned machine-guns everywhere on the river bank and by the road and they launched purges, looking for Jews and people like that.”

“We were moving from one mountain to another. We went round it and we could not pass through, it was terrible. They were firing at us, there was just the smell of it in the air. They were giving hell to our soldiers. We thought the Germans must have already retreated or withdrawn. Suddenly our soldiers stopped shooting. Stopped firing. There were piles of it. Piles of these mortars, mortar shells. Only the SD vehicles were broken, as the soldiers were throwing the stuff. Firing for two hours without stopping. It smelled awful. We thought the Germans must have been gone by now. And there was silence for one moment, and then, all of a sudden, the Germans opened fire. I dug the ground with my nose in order to dive deeper and hide.”

“He had a shack behind his house and in winter, ice was always brought there, a heap of ice. This was covered with straw and the innkeeper had beer kegs there and he was keeping it cool that way. Salt was sprinkled on top and this was covered with straw. He would always take out one keg and roll it to the tap-room.”

“It was a good place for observing, if nobody showed up, you didn’t know anything, there was silence. You could only hear that everything was falling down and as the splinters were raining down, they made a clicking sound when they hit the beech trees. You didn’t know about the shell. It could have fallen fifty metres from you and it made noise. Only a while after, a short moment after you could hear that clicking sound of the splinters. That was amazing. There were only branches, the remaining twigs were shaved off by it. It was an amazing sight. The branches were not broken, young trees only bend, they don’t break. But all the trees in that place were shaven off like this.”