Fedor Durkot

“While I was in the army we weren't allowed to write to anyone, not even a simple postcard to our parents. And we had no postcards, so we wanted to send these messages written on birch bark. We would pull it off and write that we were alive, just that simple. But our families didn't get those letters. When I had been wounded and I went to hospital, they would let my family know that I was missing in action. So for a year, my parents, my mother had been given welfare, my parents thought I was dead and when I ended up in our army, at the end of the war, I came home, and there was this reunion I would never forget. I came back home and our house, the place where we had been living, was completely destroyed, there were just chimneys, jutting towards the sky. Not a single cup had been left, they had to eat tinned food, they had to use tins as cups to drink tea or coffee. It was just ugly.”

“It was just horrible, when they would capture a Russian and they would inquire who his commander was, what his unit was and so on, they were hard as a rock. When Hungarians and Germans got them, they would give them quite a beating. I thought they just couldn't survive something like that. But they didn't talk, they would never betray their people. They had been insisting that they would rather die than to surrender.”

“Russians had been advancing with katyuchas and there was this shell that exploded right next to our trench. There were three Hungarians with me – a sniper and those two assistants. They were all killed and my leg got hit. They took me to this school where a hospital was and the first thing they said was: 'We better cut off your leg and send you home'. But I didn't let them do that and I would recover. They said I got gangrene, as there was all this dust when the grenade had exploded, stating that I would get gangrene and lose my leg anyway. And I am still walking, as you can see, without a stick or anything, at the age of eighty.”