Dimitrij Popjuk

“I said: “No! Well, guys, there is no other choice. There are twenty-five kilometers ahead of us. In order to make it over the short night, we can't wait till the dark comes and we have to go through now at day time. In a skirmishing order. Guns ready! You must not panic. We're going to pretend we're an avant-garde.” ... You had no other ideas. “Just calm down! If anybody goes panicking I'll shoot him! If I fail you do the same to me! Somebody will die here, boys, but there will definitely be some of us who will stay alive and those will deliver our gained news to the headquarters staff.” I went in the middle. I said: “You watch the right hand side! If they let us go we will go but relax – so that we didn't show that we're scared more than they are. If they go after weapons, because they have got them in a pyramid, there will be a mess. Those who are at the sides, you throw grenades, the rest of you shoot from your guns. Take to your heels and over to the other side as fast as you can. Hopefully some of you will manage to run through.” And what happened. We were about 50 meters out of the forest. In a skirmishing order. We did not feel very well. Their singing fell silent. It was so quiet that if there was a mosquito flying, you would hear it. They were watching us and we were watching them. We went through and we were about some 50 meters from them. I was watching what they were doing. The guys who were carrying a beam stopped. The others were staring at us. We were staring at them. Then I gave the command: “Run!” I couldn't stand it any more. We shot into the forest, we gathered at a brook and we didn't stay right at the border of the forest. Out of breath, of course. Only after 20 minutes we could hear shooting all over the line of the third zone front – shooting from all weapons they had. Machine guns, sub-machine guns etc.”

“There were more of us, deserters, from Carpathian Ruthenia. We were shut in a kind of a cellar room at the pavement level. There were about 120 people in a room. There was no water in there, no ventilation, nothing. We only saw out of the little windows facing the pavement that there were people walking out there – that we were on a cellar level, lower than the ground floor. We were there from August (1940) till autumn. We had no idea what the day was, the date and such. We couldn't breathe in there. Although it was a bigger room we were squashed next to each other as sardines when we lay down there. We were lying on the bare wooden floor, there was no straw nor straw mattresses there. We slept in what we wore. I had a torn and worn-off pair of trousers and a shirt. They were dirty and lousy. My hips, elbows and knees were callused because of the hard floor. We were given food three times a day – a piece of bread with tea in the morning, bean or lentil soup at lunchtime and some soup in the evening again. It looked like that they pushed a barrel behind the door, shut and left a ladle in there. Everybody had some container and all pushed their way through. Everybody wanted to be in front so that there was not only water left. There was a mess all around it. At the same time there were no toilets there but there was another barrel in the opposite corner and we used to go there. Mass of people, little room, the air – it was absolutely devastating!”

“Once I lost my eyesight all of a sudden because of the lack of food, vitamins etc. I could not see when it started getting dark in the afternoon or at the dusk. Then they let me alone for a couple of days. I didn't have to go to work and I went to the dressing station. I was given some tomato puree thee so I regained my eyesight within a fortnight again and I could go back to work. However, it had its consequences afterwards. Lack of food and vitamins, then I couldn't walk up even three stairs in front of the house. I had to stop standing on the third step already. My back was killing me and I couldn't control my legs. I had to go for drills anyway. Because if you didn't go to work you were imprisoned and there you got only 200 gramme bread and water then. It was even more exhausting. So if it was possible at least a little bit and I could move I went to work. It all ended up the way that I lost my consciousness in front of the camp gate on my way from work and I collapsed. I don't know how but I came back to myself in hospital not earlier than on the third day. It was during such a situation when the nurse was feeding me with some soup or bouillon that I extremely liked.”

“We had great losses at Bílá Cerekev. We were supposed to stop the German troops from retreat. They were retreating under the pressure of the Russian Army. We got, I would say, without losses and by a piece of luck at a plain into a space where we were supposed to stop the retreat of the German troops. However, it was just on the New Year's Eve, on the New Year's Day. It was bitter cold and the soil was frozen. We had no time nor chance to dig up trenches. The soil was as hard as a bone. Before we managed to stand in positions or at least build up some simple defense, we were surprised by the retreating troops. The tanks that darted started shooting. When the infantry was not in trenches, our troops started basically retreating in chaos. The tanks started shooting into it. We had great losses but it could have been worse. We were lucky that the tanks had armor-piercing cartridges and no fragmentation anti-infantry ones. However, when the crowd was retreating and where a cartridge from a tank flew through, there was a glade left. The crowd was running and the wounded, the dead and the pieces of the dead were lying on the snow. We were retreating for about three kilometers when the tanks were fought off by the Soviet artillery. What happened there was that a member of my platoon, a shooter, got a direct hit from a tank. He was a person of a medium build, he was the best shooter in the platoon, I would say even in the whole troop. He got a direct hit and he got completely lost in front of my eyes and only his gun was left there. It had such an impact on me that I said to myself I had to knock off at least one tank with his gun. I took it and was training. However, those were tanks about 200 meters far away. The infantry was in front for a long time. They retreated for about one or two kilometers already. And all of a sudden, I have no idea where he came from, the company commander, the second lieutenant Mautner was there. He said: 'Dimitrij, are you going nuts here? The infantry is gone. You can't do anything here. Stop it and off you go!' He carried on running. I knew I could do nothing. I only took the closure out, threw it away into the snow and I ran towards the stacks of straw. About some 50 meters from the stack I caught up with a political worker of the battalion, a cultural worker, the second lieutenant Benedikt. He was an elderly man about 50 years old. I caught up with him, he walked in his fur coat in the snow reaching up to his knees. I was younger and I could overtake him. However, we were on a culture course together so I regarded him a friend. I didn't have the conscience just to leave him and run forwards. I followed him. There were tanks shooting the infantry from one side and two heavy machine guns from the right hand side. When it was out of the range of fire already, they were shooting us. We were running. There was dust all around us. They took even burning cartridges. However, Benedikt got the worst of it.”