Major (ret.) Vladislav Cejtchaml

* 1927  †︎ 2015

  • Just what I heard then. I kept the staff service with the radio receiver, next to it was the staff room. I listened to the news from London, I could hear that, from Moscow, from Prague radio. And from the Prague radio I hear the message: "Czechoslovak bandits at the Dukla Pass failed." As I heard this, I shouted: 'Which Czech mother gave birth to this monster.' And the staff heard me and came to ask what was going on, so I told them. And two years after the war, I could still hear the woman broadcast on Prague radio. "

  • "The Germans retreated from the sixth to the seventh of May, so we moved to Břest u Hulína, a Czech village. So we got there, it was from the sixth to the seventh of May. It was just two in the morning when we got there. In the morning, when dawn broke, I went outside and went to see the village. There was such an intersection, so I went out to that intersection, and suddenly a machine gun shot at me from the church from the tower. And Sergeant Gebauer, who is buried in Břest, shouts at me, 'Run away, he's shooting at you!' And I say, 'From where?' 'Over there from the church tower.'"

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    Uničov, 16.10.2014

    (audio)
    duration: 29:19
    media recorded in project Soutěž Příběhy 20. století
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He almost drowned in the trench. Volhynian Czech fought in Dukla and in the Tatras

Vladislav Cejtchaml
Vladislav Cejtchaml
photo: soutěž

He was born in 1927 in Volhynia in the village of Hlinsk. At the age of sixteen, he joined the Czechoslovak army in the Soviet Union. He participated in the Carpatho-Dukla operation and other battles in Slovakia. At the end of the war, he only through luck escaped a shootout over the Moravian village of Břest u Kroměříže. On May 17, 1945, a witness with the army corps led by General Karel Klapálek arrived in Prague. Based on an international repatriation agreement, he could stay in Czechoslovakia. The witness used the offer of the assigned farm in Libina, and his parents also arrived after two years. Until the end of his life, he participated in celebrations to commemorate the end of the war in Brest. Vladislav Cejtchaml died in 2015.