After being hit by a grenade, I saw that when I breathed, the blood and everything around it was gushing
Josef Parpel was born on October 10, 1924 in the town of Verba in Volhynia on what was then Polish, now Ukrainian. His parents ran a shop, a butcher’s shop and an inn with a ballroom. After the occupation of the western part of Volyn by the Soviet Union, their business was nationalized. The witness’s eldest brother, Vaclav, was imprisoned in a Soviet camp, from where he was later saved by joining a Czechoslovak foreign unit in the USSR. Meanwhile, in June 1941, Volhynia was occupied by Nazi Germany. According to the witness, the Nazis executed his sister, their parents were also threatened with death, but in the end they managed to escape from prison. Josef and his siblings then hid in the surrounding villages for more than a year. The witness entered the 1st Czechoslovak army division on April 10, 1944. As a radio operator, he underwent a short military training in Bessarabia and then continued to the front near Dukla, where he met his brother Vaclav. Already on Slovak territory, the witness was hit by a mortar grenade during the repair of a broken connection and suffered a gunshot wound to the chest and lungs. He was taken from the field hospital to a hospital in Lviv and then sent for convalescence to a spa in Pyatigorsk, southern Russia, where he remained until the end of the war. After his release, he went to Prague, where he met his brothers. He took over the Czechoslovak War Cross from President Edvard Beneš and acquired a farmstead in Očíhov near Podbořany through priority. In the 1950s, his economy was collectivized and incorporated into a single agricultural cooperative. Until his retirement, the witness worked as a zootechnician. Sixty years after his war wounds, three more mortar shrapnel fragments were found during an X-ray of his lungs. He lived in Podbořany at the time of filming the interview (2005).