“Personally, I have nothing to complain about. When I walked to school, I walked on a railroad track, we lived near a railroad, and it was being guarded by Germans. They already knew me, said hello to me every time. I did not have any problems with them.”
“I remember how the Germans gathered all the Gypsies, led them out and began to shoot them. We attacked them. One of the Gypsies asked us to give him a sub-machine gun, that he would settle it with them by himself. Our soldier gave him the sub-machine gun and he shot them all.”
“That´s the way Dukla was. A soldier made a path, and we all walked on that path. If you stepped aside, you stepped on a land mine. It was all mined. It was terrible. Where possible, a tank would pass first, and the soldiers then walked in the tracks it made, or you just had to be awfully careful. The mines looked like small wooden boxes – there was an explosive and a fuse. It could tear your leg off, if you stepped on it.”
“There was a little boy and he always followed me. He comes to me and says: ´My Daddy invites you for dinner.´ I took some tins with food, because as for supplies, we had enough. And cigarettes, also. And I went to their place. He was very surprised that we were being supplied so well.”
“One time I heard a Polish radio transmission – the soldiers were not able to make a connection with their station. I could hear both of the Polish radio operators. So I spoke out, I speak Polish, and said that if it’s OK with him, I would transmit the message for him. He said it was nothing confidential, so I could give it a try. I connected to their radio, they gave me the message, and I transmitted it to the other station. There was some Polish commander, he made note of my name, and after the war he came to Olomouc. There he found me and he decorated me with a war cross.”
“I could have come back, but it was not worth it. The Bander groups were raiding the place… Some of our boys went there, but they stripped them naked, took their military uniforms. It was not worth going there.”
“The Germans advanced to forests and we followed them. They did not give up. We followed them. We came to the forest, the Germans stopped there, and the Russian soldiers were already taking them captives – pulling their shoes from their feet, and taking everything…”
Mikuláš Paul, captain in retirement, was born May 25th 1925 in Volhynia. After the completion of a secondary technical school he was immediately assigned to military training. In 1943, together with his brother, they joined the Czechoslovak army unit which was being formed at the time. He was trained as a scout radio operator, and afterward deployed in the Carpathian-Dukla operation. There, he suffered an injury to his face, caused by grenade shrapnel. With the exception of some broken teeth his injury was not too serious. He again took part in combat near Liptovský Mikuláš and the liberation of Moravia in the Prostějov region. After the war he did not contemplate return to his native Ukraine anymore. He shortly lived in Prague and then in the Žatec region, and eventually settled in Paseky, where he received an agricultural farm as part of the repatriation program. After the beginning of the co-operation of agriculture he rather chose to move to Prostějov, where he found employment in a local machinery factory. He worked there until his retirement. He died on November 18, 2004.
