"We had to get off the train in Voronez town, because the Germans destroyed the railway in front of us. They used the tank engines the ropes with hooks on the end attached to them and ripping off the rails. We had to walk all the way to Charkov, it was 350 kilometers. We had to manage in two weeks time. During the day we split in to several village houses, so the enemy wouldn´t find us and then during the nights we had to march through the snow. It was freezing cold about 25 to 35 degrees below zero."
"Our main ally was the Soviet Union at that time and our relationship toward them was very complicated. On one hand there were the soldiers with the red star on their hats which reminded us of the concentration camp. But what we said was that it´s not these poor soldier´s fault. We can´t blame them for being locked in camps. We saw them fight bravely and they always treated us good."
"I´m catholic. My mom believed in God and so do I. I believed that everything will be fine. When we were in prison we used to make these balls out of the bread dough or chessmen. Or we put them on the string pretending it was the chaplet. Those were our prayers."
"Buzuluk, that’s a Urals plain where is continental climate. The Temperatures were as high as 45 degrees during the day and during the night was cold. We couldn’t get used these hot days that’s why Lt. Svoboda has ordered some exercise changes. We had to get up very early in the morning - at about 4am - then we worked out until 10am and after that we were supposed to be sleeping, but we could not fall asleep in such heat. The next work out was from 6pm. I couldn’t put up with it, because my body was weakened from the concentration camp, but a young body can suffer anything..."
"The hearing could´t be complete without the face slaps, of course. A lot of violence has been used on me. Although I was lucky, because this guy who held the hearing in my case, started probably feel sorry for me, so we were solving several math problems during the questioning. Then they gave me some protocol to sign. I have noticed, that during the hearings there always have been lots pins on the table. I figured that they were used
to get the confession from people. Fortunately I wasn´t among them."
Mr. Jaroslav Procházka was born on December 17th 1923 in Prague. He spent his childhood in Polish town called Sniatyn near by Lvov town. After the Russian occupation of the Lvov’s territorial region (There used to be 16 regions in former Poland back then) he was sent to one of the forced labor camps (Gulag) and later was sentenced to 10 years in prison. After the German attack of the USSR in 1941 he has been moved to Buzuluk camp in Russia, where he underwent the general military training to become an operator-signalman. In 1943 he participated in the battle in Sokolov town (western Bohemia) and during the establishment of the 1st Czechoslovak army corps he served as an aide of the general Ludvik Svoboda. He also fought in the battle of the Dukla pass in fall of 1944. After the end of the war he started the studies at the electrical university. Unfortunately he couldn’t finish this school due to family reasons. After the February 1968 he has been chased by the former regime, because he refused to become the member of the Communist party. He was a member of the Czech Legionnaires Association since 1946 and during the Prague’s spring he was its local chairman in Pilsen town. But during the normalization period he has been withdrawn form all his positions. He became an active political citizen again after the year 1989. Jaroslav Procházka died on June 5th, 2005.
