Libuše Gramišová

"We stayed there for three months. And it was very tough training indeed. We stood by the woods. We have been ordered to stay along the woods to get used to the hard conditions. Of course they put us into bunkers. It was raining so we slept in the bunkers. The ground was soaked with water... And the village was just ahead of us. We spent the whole training in bunkers. We all spent the training time in the woods."

"We got beaten up there in Dukla. We were accommodated in a huge house when they started to fire. One German soldier was sitting on top of the factory roof giving precise information about the location of our soldiers. Their hits were precise. They burst into our kitchen and everything there was in the air, including our cook and everyone else around. Then we moved to some old fashion building with very thick walls. I’m not sure what whether it was some mansion or some kind of bureau. When they started the fire, we must have laid down by the walls to eliminate the danger. We could’ve been hit by the windows. We used the crossbars to close the windows. Everything inside was shaking. I wasn’t even scared that much. Young people see everything with different eyes, they are not afraid of anything."

"I was twelve when the war started. The life was no longer easy there. You know, Poland went down in 1939. In only fourteen days. Then the Russians came and took over half of our territory. The Germans took the second half. Our parents were rather rich. The Czechs used to be very hard working people, usually the worked on the farmstead. They owned 20 acres of land; therefore they were called the kulaks (independent farmers - translator’s note). The Russians stayed there for two years when the Germans attacked them. Three days later we were supposed to be on the Siberia transport. It’s embarrassing to say so, but the Germans saved us. We would have been died in Siberia."