“General Svoboda was a friendly man. He went to the front, to the first line. He was riding a horse and kept saying: ‘Boys, how are you boys, we have to withstand this boys, we have enlisted; we have to fight; we mustn’t let Czechoslovakia to be taken from us by a foreign state.”
"Krosno, there were hard battles. We stood there for about three weeks and it couldn't move. Liasion officers kept bringing pictures of the dead people to ask if we recognize any of them. Only of my classmates, eight of them died there. After the war their parents came to visit me, they wanted to know if I saw them and where exactly they went down."
“Český Malín at Luck caught fire at that time, there were said to be some traitors. The Germans drove all men to the school and burnt down all homesteads. It was about 30 kilometres far from our village, we felt terrible to see everything burning.”
Emilie Kozáková was born in 1926 in the village of Sklyn in the Volhynia. She was the oldest of seven children and attended a Polish school where she encountered the Ukrainian resistance against Czechs. Since childhood she has been a great patriot. In 1943 she witnessed the burning down of Český Malín. In June 1944 Emilie Kozáková signed up to the 1st Czechoslovak independent brigade and was assigned to the field post. She took part in the battle of Krosno and Dukla where she suffered an injury but refused to be transported to the USSR. In May 1945 she participated in the liberation of Prague. She was awarded the Order of the Red Star after the war. She lived in Řídeč in the Olomouc region and her children and grandchildren made up for all the suffering she had to go through during the war. She died in 28th october 2013.
