“My name is Jiří Kopinec, I was born in Carpathian Ruthenia which was once a part of Czechoslovakia. I was born on June 9, 1921. I lived there until 1940.”
Question: “What exactly was the name of the place where you were born?”
Answer: “Imstičevo.”
Question: “What was nearby?”
Answer: “The Irshav district. The nearest town was Berehovo and Mukačevo. The elder generations here know it.”
Question: “What were the names of your parents?”
Answer: “My mother’s name was Anna Páková-Kopincová and my father’s name was Stefan Kopinec.”
Question: “Did you have any siblings?”
Answer: “I had a lot of siblings. I had four brothers and one sister. Their names were…”
Question: “I think you don’t have to give me their names… I’d like to ask you though what your parents were by profession.”
Answer: “They worked in agriculture, the country was mostly agricultural. There was no industry to speak of.”
Question: “Did you have a manor?”
Answer: “Well, a manor, we had 11 hectares, so we could have some livestock and the…”
Question: “So that’s enough. So you didn’t have a bad life there?”
Answer: “Well, it was much better in the first republic than under the Hungarians. When the collectivization began under the Soviets, it was much worse. The Soviets, I mean I don’t want to talk badly about them, but they took the best land and profited from the collectivization.”
“I spent almost four weeks in this Gulag hospital. I met some Georgian there who told me: “my son, I’ll heal you”. “But healing meant... They were treating us with cheese, butter and peas and better food in general.”
Question: “So in fact he treated you with just a bit better food.”
Answer: “Right. Then they took us away to another place. We were being prepared for joining the Czechoslovak army.”
Question: “Somebody offered you to join the Czechoslovak army? Someone came to the camp with the offer?”
Answer: “Yes, yes, we’ll get to that later ok? So they sent us off to another place where we got better food and treatment. They had even blankets there. It was really decent, they also had mattresses there.”
Question: “That was still in that lagpunkt seven?”
Answer: “No.”
Question: “This was somewhere else?”
Answer: “Somewhere else.” (It turned out that the prisoners were transferred to another camp roughly 60 km away from the original camp.)
“I have to tell you, we were really glad that we had the chance to join the Czechoslovak army. First of all, life in the Gulag was terrible, really terrible, and although we knew that some of us would die in the fighting, the feeling of being free was decisive. Secondly, we were enthusiastic about the idea of liberating Czechoslovakia. At that point we were still confident that Carpathian Ruthenia would remain a part of Czechoslovakia. Well, it didn’t turn out that way.”
Question: “How was the situation in Kiev when you arrived there? Was it still occupied by the Germans by that time?”
Answer: “Kiev was still under German occupation when we came there. We came to the river Dnieper and hid in a small forest. The forest was called Luschtchina, it’s Ukrainian. In this forest we were preparing for the attack on Kiev. The attack started on November 6. The fighting at Kiev was particularly fierce as the Germans had set up four anti-tank trenches at Kiev. We had to break through these trenches and build bridges over them so that our tanks could pass. It was our task to destroy these trenches. We did this by using explosives. Then we build the bridges for the tanks. After we did this, we joined the regular infantry units in the fighting.”
Question: “So you had to blow it up? You blew up the trench in order to change the terrain so that the tanks could pass?”
Answer: “Yes, we leveled the trench in one place so that the tanks and the artillery men could pass.”
Question: “At Kiev you joined the infantry and fought with it?”
Answer: “Yes, we fought with them against the Germans. Normally, the engineers were the first ones to move forward and the last ones to retreat.”
“As far as food is concerned, there were various cauldrons. The cauldron Nr. 1 was the worst. There was, however, the so-called “štráfnyj” cauldron, which was the worst. This cauldron was for those who didn’t work at all. Those who worked but only reached some 60–70 % of average productivity got the cauldron Nr. 1. Those who reached 100% productivity got cauldron Nr. 2, and those working up to 110%, 120% or 130% got even more food. So food rations varied according to productivity.”
Question: “Could you describe the quality of the food in the various cauldrons? Could we start with the “štrafný” cauldron?”
Answer: “Well, the only difference was actually the amount of so-called “buločky”, a sort of a baked yeast dumpling. They added these buločky to the food.”
Question: “They served these buločky separately?”
Answer: “Yes, you had the buločky additionally.”
Question: “And the soup was the same?”
Answer: “The soup was the same, there was no difference.”
“When we arrived there we found almost nothing in the camp. There were quite many of us in different camps. I was in a camp that was called “Lagpunkt Nr. 7”. In this camp there were approximately 5000 people. But besides that, there was almost nothing, not even a forest. There were some bushes but that was it. It was only frozen tundra. We had to build our houses ourselves but that was extremely difficult as the soil was frozen. The pits we had to dig were up to two meters deep, actually two meters twenty. The pits were a meter wide and a meter long. When we had built the bases for the houses, because the houses were made of wood…”
Question: “So the bases of the houses were a meter long and a meter wide…”
Answer: “Yes, a meter wide and a meter long and the ground was completely frozen. It often took three days! We did it like this: We stayed in these shafts or pits over the night and made a fire from the coal we had collected during the day. The heat from the fire made the ground in the pit thaw up to a depth of some 60 – 70 centimeters. So we could dig up to these 60-70 centimeters. Then we had to make a fire again. And that’s how we did it over and over again. Because we had to keep certain norms that were set. Based on these norms, we received our food. So if you couldn’t keep up with their norms, you were given reduced food ratios.”
“We didn’t know whether it was Saturday or Sunday. We just had to fulfill the norm. The only exception was the so-called “artirovky”, which means frosty days when the cold was even reinforced by strong winds. Only on these occasions would they let us stay in.”
Jiří Kopinec, a retired colonel, was born on June 19, 1921, in the village of Imstičevo in Carpathian Ruthenia (not far away from Mukačevo). He had five siblings and his parents worked as peasants. The family lived off of 11 hectares of land. At the end of the summer of 1940, he left his occupied motherland with a group of friends. They crossed the border to the Soviet Union where he was arrested. He was held in several prisons and detention camps in the USSR, including; Skola, Stryje and Starobělsk. He was later transferred to the Gulag in Vorkuta, where he stayed until his release in 1943. In 1943, he accepted the offer to join the 1st Czechoslovak army corps that was formed in the USSR. He became an army engineer and fought at Kiev, Ruda, Biela Cerkev, Dukla, in Slovakia and Moravia. He was wounded twice during battle. After the war, he worked for the army searching and dismantling land mines in various places in Czechoslovakia. He retired in 1978 and lived in Theresienstadt with his wife Miluše. They had three children. He passed away on July, 17th, 2014.
