“And our laws. I wouldn’t... You can see for yourselves how courts work. And you hear it. Policemen stealing, taking bribes, lawyers, judges. There is democracy here, but it is a strange form of democracy, I imagined it would be different. I grew up in Poland in Volhynia, but the Poles, they had true democracy. Laws were being observed and kept, and people had to abide by them. The Poles had no problems with the Czechs. Czechs were hard-working, ambitious, but the Ukrainians had to adapt to it and they didn’t like it too much.”
“The Soviets came, and while under the Polish rule, the shops had been full of goods, when the Soviets then came, after a week there was nothing. Nothing at all. There were no businesses. Things got stolen or I don’t know what happened. The Russians took everything in the town. And in the villages as well, I don’t know where all these things went to. There was nothing. We only received salt, nothing else. There was nothing, absolutely nothing.”
“We were receiving books from the Czech Republic, the Matice Školská organization was sending various nice books to children in Volhynia. And there was a library with many books, too. I remember my grandmother used to borrow books from the library, and I would always look through the books she brought. And I was very curious. Romantic novels for ladies. I would finish the book even before grandma managed to read it. Books like that.”
“When the Russians came there, a double tax was introduced. One was called kulsbor, it was paid in spring and autumn. And the other one was ´rinočnej.´ The taxes were quite high. It was always a few thousand rubles. But when you were selling your produce, you only got for instance four rubles for a hundred kilograms of rye. And if the levied taxes were six thousand rubles in spring and in autumn, the people were not able to pay them, they were selling whatever they could. When the Russians came, we had four horses. Two horses, and two-year-old and one-year-old foals. Uncle Jeník took this two-year-old foal and my dad went with the one-year-old to Rovno and sold it. We also sold cows and pigs and we did pay the taxes. But this Olič did not pay and off he went. And this Nýče as well. These two were taken away. But then there were rumours that before the Germans came, in Zdolbunov, wagons had already been prepared to take these kulaks away. But they didn’t have time for it anymore. The Germans came.”
“Sure, they passed through Hlinsk. When my grandma saw them, she wrought her hands and exclaimed: ´Good Lord! That gang of thieves is coming here again!´ For my grandma had experienced the Soviets already, in 1920. And at that time there were hordes of them, riding on horses. One had a cap on his head, another one a hat, another a scarf, and they were riding very fast. These Bolsheviks had driven the Poles all the way to Warsaw. And the Poles were then chasing them, chasing them all the way there.”
“The town was called Garwolin, and my dad came there and there they were captured by the Russians. My dad thus got into captivity. Together with one Ukrainian from Basankut they walked to Rovno from that Garwolin, all the way till they reached home. They were meeting Russians on the way. And how they looked! They walked barefooted, because they couldn’t have shoes. It was in autumn, it was not freezing yet. In September. Unshaven, dirty, and the Russians, when they met them, were making fun of them that they were Polish soldiers. Poles look that way. Two Soviet soldiers allegedly stopped them: ´Stoj! Where are you going from?´ They said: ´We are going home.´ They asked them: ´You are an officer? Ty oficér?´ Daddy replied: ´We’re no officers.´ ´But you have a paron! A bracelet.´ Daddy says: ´In the Polish army, all had bracelets. Some had bracelets with one star, some with two or three stars. I have no stars on my bracelet.´ ´Nět, you are an officer.´ What to do? ´Take them off.´ They had a knife, so dad said: ´I cut his bracelet and he cut mine, and we continued walking.´ And this way they got home. Dad came barefooted, he had pneumonia, once, and for a second time. He survived, but he did suffer some consequences of it”
“When the Czechs came to Hlinsk, it was terrible there. The Ukrainians there were living like in the Middle Ages. The cottages were of the dug-out type. Some had cottages with a hole in the roof, they did not even have a chimney. They were living this way. And only when the Czechs came, they showed them that there was also another way of living. That it was possible to live differently, but it called for their own effort as well.”
Marie Škrabánková, née Nováková, comes from Volhynia. She was born in 1925 in the village of Hlinsk in the region which was a part of Poland at that time. When she was preparing for studying at a trade school in Krakow, Volhynia was attacked by the Soviet army. She never entered that school. In her native town she experienced the arrival of the Soviet army, German army and subsequently of the Soviet army again. She considers the time when kolkhozes were being founded in Hlinsk to be the worst of all. Some of the locals were taken into gulags. In 1944, when the Soviet army drove out the Germans, she joined the Czechoslovak corps as a nurse. She took a course in Kiev and then was sent to Humenné. While in hospitals she witnessed great suffering and many human lives becoming wasted. She was working days and nights and she hardly managed to cope with exhaustion. After the end of the war she briefly served in Kroměříž, Čáslav and Žatec. Then she was allotted a farm in Unterlangendorf (present-day Dlouhá Loučka). For a short time she was working there alongside its former German owners. In 1950 communists arrested her husband-to-be. The reason for his arrest was that his parents were religious and owned one of the largest farms in the village. Josef Škrabánek was sentenced to six years of labour in the mines in Jáchymov. Marie Škrabánková was waiting for him all this time and they married after he returned. She experienced the collectivization once again, this time in Czechoslovakia. When they refused to join the agricultural co-operative, their fields were exchanged for worse and farther fields several times, and subsequently their agricultural machinery and cattle were confiscated. They joined the co-operative as the last ones in 1959. Later their children had great problems when trying to become admitted to schools. Marie Škrabánková passed away on August, the 11th, 2012.
